An official website of the United States government
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in code generation. However, there remains a limited understanding of code generation errors that LLMs can produce. To bridge the gap, we conducted an in-depth analysis of code generation errors across six representative LLMs on the HumanEval dataset. Specifically, we first employed open coding and thematic analysis to distill a comprehensive taxonomy of code generation errors. We analyzed two dimensions of error characteristics -- semantic characteristics and syntactic characteristics. Our analysis revealed that LLMs often made non-trivial, multi-line code generation errors in various locations and with various root causes. We further analyzed the correlation between these errors and task complexity as well as test pass rate. Our findings highlighted several challenges in locating and fixing code generation errors made by LLMs. In the end, we discussed several future directions to address these challenges.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on June 18, 2026
Correlated Errors in Large Language Models
Diversity in training data, architecture, and providers is assumed to mitigate homogeneity in LLMs. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether different LLMs differ \textit{meaningfully}. We conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation on over 350 LLMs overall, using two popular leaderboards and a resume-screening task. We find substantial correlation in model errors---on one leaderboard dataset, models agree 60% of the time when both models err. We identify factors driving model correlation, including shared architectures and providers. Crucially, however, larger and more accurate models have highly correlated errors, even with distinct architectures and providers. Finally, we show the effects of correlation in two downstream tasks: LLM-as-judge evaluation and hiring---the latter reflecting theoretical predictions regarding algorithmic monoculture.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2339427
- PAR ID:
- 10616986
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Conference on Machine Learning
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The long-standing one-to-many problem of gold standard responses in open-domain dialogue systems presents challenges for automatic evaluation metrics. Though prior works have demonstrated some success by applying powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), existing approaches still struggle with the one-to-many problem, and exhibit subpar performance in domain-specific scenarios. We assume the commonsense reasoning biases within LLMs may hinder their performance in domain-specific evaluations. To address both issues, we propose a novel framework SLIDE (Small and Large Integrated for Dialogue Evaluation), that leverages both a small, specialized model (SLM), and LLMs for the evaluation of open-domain dialogues. Our approach introduces several techniques: (1) Contrastive learning to differentiate between robust and non-robust response embeddings; (2) A novel metric for semantic sensitivity that combines embedding cosine distances with similarity learned through neural networks, and (3) A strategy for incorporating the evaluation results from both the SLM and LLMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both the classification and evaluation tasks, and additionally, the SLIDE evaluator exhibits a better correlation with human judgments.more » « less
-
Large language models offer new ways of empowering people to program robot applications-namely, code generation via prompting. However, the code generated by LLMs is susceptible to errors. This work reports a preliminary exploration that empirically characterizes common errors produced by LLMs in robot programming. We categorize these errors into two phases: interpretation and execution. In this work, we focus on errors in execution and observe that they are caused by LLMs being “forgetful” of key information provided in user prompts. Based on this observation, we propose prompt engineering tactics designed to reduce errors in execution. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of these tactics with three language models: ChatGPT, Bard, and LLaMA-2. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from using LLMs in robot programming and call for the benchmarking of LLM-powered end-user development of robot applications.more » « less
-
The burgeoning sophistication of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has catalyzed the rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) within software development. These models are increasingly employed to automate the generation of functionally correct code, address complex computational problems, and facilitate the debugging of existing software systems. However, LLM-generated code often faces challenges due to inherent inefficiencies, including redundant logical structures, factually inconsistent content (hallucinations), and programming errors. To address this issue, our research rigorously evaluated the computational efficiency of Python code generated by three prominent LLMs: GPT-4o-Mini, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and GPT-4-Turbo. The evaluation metrics encompass execution time, memory utilization, and peak memory consumption, while maintaining the functional correctness of the generated code. Leveraging the EffiBench benchmark datasets within the Google Vertex AI Workbench environment, across a spectrum of machine configurations, the study implemented a consistent seed parameter to ensure experimental reproducibility. Furthermore, we investigated the impact of two distinct optimization strategies: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and model fine-tuning. Our findings reveal a significant enhancement in efficiency metrics for GPT-4o-Mini and GPT-3.5-Turbo when employing CoT prompting; however, this trend was not observed for GPT-4-Turbo. Based on its promising performance with CoT prompting, we selected the GPT-4o-Mini model for subsequent fine-tuning, aiming to further enhance both its computational efficiency and accuracy. However, contrary to our expectations, fine-tuning the GPT-4o-Mini model led to a discernible degradation in both its accuracy and computational efficiency. In conclusion, this study provides empirical evidence suggesting that the deployment of high-CPU machine configurations, in synergy with the utilization of the GPT-4o-Mini model and CoT prompting techniques, yields demonstrably more efficient and accurate LLM-generated Python code, particularly within computationally intensive application scenarios.more » « less
-
This paper presents the Hallucination Recognition Model for New Experiment Evaluation (HaRMoNEE) team’s winning (#1) and #10 submissions for SemEval-2024 Task 6: Sharedtask on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes (SHROOM)’s two subtasks. This task challenged its participants to design systems to detect hallucinations in Large Language Model (LLM) outputs. Team HaRMoNEE proposes two architectures: (1) fine-tuning an off-the-shelf transformer-based model and (2) prompt tuning large-scale Large Language Models (LLMs). One submission from the fine-tuning approach outperformed all other submissions for the model-aware subtask; one submission from the prompt-tuning approach is the 10th-best submission on the leaderboard for the modelagnostic subtask. Our systems also include pre-processing, system-specific tuning, postprocessing, and evaluation.more » « less
