An official website of the United States government
A significant amount of research is focused on developing and evaluating large language models for a variety of code synthesis tasks. These include synthesizing code from natural language, synthesizing tests from code, and synthesizing explanations of code. In contrast, the behavior of instructional code editing with LLMs is understudied. These are tasks in which the model is provided a block of code and an instruction to modify the code. The editing instruction may ask for a feature to be added or removed, describe a bug and ask for a fix, or ask for a different kind of solution. We introduce a carefully crafted benchmark of code editing tasks and use it to evaluate several cutting edge LLMs. Our evaluation exposes a significant gap between the capabilities of state-of-the-art open and closed models. For example, even GPT-3.5-Turbo is better than the best open model at code editing tasks. We also introduce a new, carefully curated, permissively licensed training dataset of code editing tasks coupled with natural language instructions. Using this training dataset, we show that we can fine-tune open Code LLMs to significantly improve their code editing capabilities, closing the gap between open and closed models. All code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/nuprl/CanItEdit.
more »
« less
Assessment of chemistry knowledge in large language models that generate code
In this work, we investigate the question: do code-generating large language models know chemistry? Our results indicate, mostly yes. To evaluate this, we introduce an expandable framework for evaluating chemistry knowledge in these models, through prompting models to solve chemistry problems posed as coding tasks. To do so, we produce a benchmark set of problems, and evaluate these models based on correctness of code by automated testing and evaluation by experts. We find that recent LLMs are able to write correct code across a variety of topics in chemistry and their accuracy can be increased by 30 percentage points via prompt engineering strategies, like putting copyright notices at the top of files. Our dataset and evaluation tools are open source which can be contributed to or built upon by future researchers, and will serve as a community resource for evaluating the performance of new models as they emerge. We also describe some good practices for employing LLMs in chemistry. The general success of these models demonstrates that their impact on chemistry teaching and research is poised to be enormous.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10428078
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Digital Discovery
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2635-098X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 368 to 376
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Benjamin, Paaßen; Carrie, Demmans Epp (Ed.)The effectiveness of feedback in enhancing learning outcomes is well documented within Educational Data Mining (EDM). Various prior research have explored methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of feedback to students in various ways. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their utility in enhancing automated feedback systems. This study aims to explore the potential of LLMs in facilitating automated feedback in math education in the form of numeric assessment scores. We examine the effectiveness of LLMs in evaluating student responses and scoring the responses by comparing 3 different models: Llama, SBERT-Canberra, and GPT4 model. The evaluation requires the model to provide a quantitative score on the student's responses to open-ended math problems. We employ Mistral, a version of Llama catered to math, and fine-tune this model for evaluating student responses by leveraging a dataset of student responses and teacher-provided scores for middle-school math problems. A similar approach was taken for training the SBERT-Canberra model, while the GPT4 model used a zero-shot learning approach. We evaluate and compare the models' performance in scoring accuracy. This study aims to further the ongoing development of automated assessment and feedback systems and outline potential future directions for leveraging generative LLMs in building automated feedback systems.more » « less
-
When seeking information from unfamiliar documents, users frequently pose questions that cannot be answered by the documents. While existing large language models (LLMs) identify these unanswerable questions, they do not assist users in reformulating their questions, thereby reducing their overall utility. We curate CouldAsk, an evaluation benchmark composed of existing and new datasets for document-grounded question answering, specifically designed to study reformulating unanswerable questions. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs on CouldAsk. The results demonstrate the limited capabilities of these models in reformulating questions. Specifically, GPT-4 and Llama2-7B successfully reformulate questions only 26% and 12% of the time, respectively. Error analysis shows that 62% of the unsuccessful reformulations stem from the models merely rephrasing the questions or even generating identical questions. We publicly release the benchmark and the code to reproduce the experiments.more » « less
-
Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) are being increasingly employed in real-life applications, so evaluating them is critical. While the conventional accuracy evaluates the performance of Code LLMs on a set of individual tasks, their self-consistency across different tasks is overlooked. Intuitively, a trustworthy model should be self-consistent when generating natural language specifications for its own code and generating code for its own specifications. Failure to preserve self-consistency reveals a lack of understanding of the shared semantics underlying natural language and programming language, and therefore undermines the trustworthiness of a model. In this paper, we first formally define the self-consistency of Code LLMs and then design a framework, IdentityChain, which effectively and efficiently evaluates the self-consistency and conventional accuracy of a model at the same time. We study eleven Code LLMs and show that they fail to preserve self-consistency, which is indeed a distinct aspect from conventional accuracy. Furthermore, we show that IdentityChain can be used as a model debugging tool to expose weaknesses of Code LLMs by demonstrating three major weaknesses that we identify in current models using IdentityChain. Our code is available at https://github.com/marcusm117/IdentityChain.more » « less
-
Automating hardware design could obviate a signif-icant amount of human error from the engineering process and lead to fewer errors. Verilog is a popular hardware description language to model and design digital systems, thus generating Verilog code is a critical first step. Emerging large language models (LLMs) are able to write high-quality code in other programming languages. In this paper, we characterize the ability of LLMs to generate useful Verilog. For this, we fine-tune pre-trained LLMs on Verilog datasets collected from GitHub and Verilog textbooks. We construct an evaluation framework comprising test-benches for functional analysis and a flow to test the syntax of Verilog code generated in response to problems of varying difficulty. Our findings show that across our problem scenarios, the fine-tuning results in LLMs more capable of producing syntactically correct code (25.9% overall). Further, when analyzing functional correctness, a fine-tuned open-source CodeGen LLM can outperform the state-of-the-art commercial Codex LLM (6.5% overall). We release our training/evaluation scripts and LLM checkpoints as open source contributions.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/D2DD00087C
