Daily Papers

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation, particularly for implementing target functionalities from natural language descriptions, have been extensively studied. As an alternative form of natural language, input-output examples (I/O examples) provide an accessible, unambiguous, and flexible way to describe functionalities, but the diversity, sparseness, and incompleteness of I/O examples also place challenges on understanding and implementing requirements. Therefore, generating code from input-output examples (i.e., example-based code generation) provides a new perspective, allowing us to evaluate LLMs' capability to infer target functionalities from limited information and to process new-form requirements. However, related research about LLMs in example-based code generation remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive study on example-based code generation using LLMs. To address the incorrectness caused by the incompleteness of I/O examples, we adopt an iterative evaluation framework and formalize the objective of example-based code generation as two sequential sub-objectives: generating code conforming to given examples and generating code that successfully implements the target functionalities from (iteratively) given examples. We assess six state-of-the-art LLMs using a new benchmark of 168 diverse target functionalities. The results demonstrate that when requirements were described using iterative I/O examples rather than natural language, the LLMs' score decreased by over 60%, indicating that example-based code generation remains challenging for the evaluated LLMs. More interestingly, the vast majority (even over 95%) of successfully implemented functionalities are achieved in the first round of iterations, suggesting that the LLMs struggle to effectively utilize the iteratively supplemented requirements.

The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) has been significantly boosted by the development of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). These models have revolutionized NLP tasks, particularly in code generation, aiding developers in creating software with enhanced efficiency. Despite their advancements, challenges in balancing code snippet generation with effective test case generation and execution persist. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-Agent Assistant Code Generation (AgentCoder), a novel solution comprising a multi-agent framework with specialized agents: the programmer agent, the test designer agent, and the test executor agent. During the coding procedure, the programmer agent will focus on the code generation and refinement based on the test executor agent's feedback. The test designer agent will generate test cases for the generated code, and the test executor agent will run the code with the test cases and write the feedback to the programmer. This collaborative system ensures robust code generation, surpassing the limitations of single-agent models and traditional methodologies. Our extensive experiments on 9 code generation models and 12 enhancement approaches showcase AgentCoder's superior performance over existing code generation models and prompt engineering techniques across various benchmarks. For example, AgentCoder achieves 77.4% and 89.1% pass@1 in HumanEval-ET and MBPP-ET with GPT-3.5, while SOTA baselines obtain only 69.5% and 63.0%.

Infographic charts are a powerful medium for communicating abstract data by combining visual elements (e.g., charts, images) with textual information. However, their visual and structural richness poses challenges for large vision-language models (LVLMs), which are typically trained on plain charts. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChartGalaxy, a million-scale dataset designed to advance the understanding and generation of infographic charts. The dataset is constructed through an inductive process that identifies 75 chart types, 330 chart variations, and 68 layout templates from real infographic charts and uses them to create synthetic ones programmatically. We showcase the utility of this dataset through: 1) improving infographic chart understanding via fine-tuning, 2) benchmarking code generation for infographic charts, and 3) enabling example-based infographic chart generation. By capturing the visual and structural complexity of real design, ChartGalaxy provides a useful resource for enhancing multimodal reasoning and generation in LVLMs.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in applying them to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tasks, particularly Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation. While several RTL datasets have been introduced, most focus on syntactic validity rather than functional validation with tests, leading to training examples that compile but may not implement the intended behavior. We present VERICODER, a model for RTL code generation fine-tuned on a dataset validated for functional correctness. This fine-tuning dataset is constructed using a novel methodology that combines unit test generation with feedback-directed refinement. Given a natural language specification and an initial RTL design, we prompt a teacher model (GPT-4o-mini) to generate unit tests and iteratively revise the RTL design based on its simulation results using the generated tests. If necessary, the teacher model also updates the tests to ensure they comply with the natural language specification. As a result of this process, every example in our dataset is functionally validated, consisting of a natural language description, an RTL implementation, and passing tests. Fine-tuned on this dataset of over 125,000 examples, VERICODER achieves state-of-the-art metrics in functional correctness on VerilogEval and RTLLM, with relative gains of up to 71.7% and 27.4% respectively. An ablation study further shows that models trained on our functionally validated dataset outperform those trained on functionally non-validated datasets, underscoring the importance of high-quality datasets in RTL code generation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive in-context learning (ICL) ability in code generation. LLMs take a prompt consisting of requirement-code examples and a new requirement as input, and output new programs. Existing studies have found that ICL is highly dominated by the examples and thus arises research on example selection. However, existing approaches randomly select examples or only consider the textual similarity of requirements to retrieve, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based selection approach named LAIL (LLM-Aware In-context Learning) for code generation. Given a candidate example, we exploit LLMs themselves to estimate it by considering the generation probabilities of ground-truth programs given a requirement and the example. We then label candidate examples as positive or negative through the probability feedback. Based on the labeled data, we import a contrastive learning objective to train an effective retriever that acquires the preference of LLMs in code generation. We apply LAIL to three LLMs and evaluate it on three representative datasets (e.g., MBJP, MBPP, and MBCPP). LATA outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 11.58%, 6.89%, and 5.07% on CodeGen, and 4.38%, 2.85%, and 2.74% on GPT-3.5 in terms of Pass@1, respectively.

Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

Program synthesis or code generation aims to generate a program that satisfies a problem specification. Recent approaches using large-scale pretrained language models (LMs) have shown promising results, yet they have some critical limitations. In particular, they often follow a standard supervised fine-tuning procedure to train a code generation model only from the pairs of natural-language problem descriptions and ground-truth programs. Such paradigm largely ignores some important but potentially useful signals in the problem specification such as unit tests, which thus often results in poor performance when solving complex unseen coding tasks. To address the limitations, we propose "CodeRL", a new framework for program synthesis tasks through pretrained LMs and deep reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, during training, we treat the code-generating LM as an actor network, and introduce a critic network that is trained to predict the functional correctness of generated programs and provide dense feedback signals to the actor. During inference, we introduce a new generation procedure with a critical sampling strategy that allows a model to automatically regenerate programs based on feedback from example unit tests and critic scores. For the model backbones, we extended the encoder-decoder architecture of CodeT5 with enhanced learning objectives, larger model sizes, and better pretraining data. Our method not only achieves new SOTA results on the challenging APPS benchmark, but also shows strong zero-shot transfer capability with new SOTA results on the simpler MBPP benchmark.

Interactive programming with interleaved code snippet cells and natural language markdown is recently gaining popularity in the form of Jupyter notebooks, which accelerate prototyping and collaboration. To study code generation conditioned on a long context history, we present JuICe, a corpus of 1.5 million examples with a curated test set of 3.7K instances based on online programming assignments. Compared with existing contextual code generation datasets, JuICe provides refined human-curated data, open-domain code, and an order of magnitude more training data. Using JuICe, we train models for two tasks: (1) generation of the API call sequence in a code cell, and (2) full code cell generation, both conditioned on the NL-Code history up to a particular code cell. Experiments using current baseline code generation models show that both context and distant supervision aid in generation, and that the dataset is challenging for current systems.

Recent developments show that Large Language Models (LLMs) produce state-of-the-art performance on natural language (NL) to code generation for resource-rich general-purpose languages like C++, Java, and Python. However, their practical usage for structured domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as YAML, JSON is limited due to domain-specific schema, grammar, and customizations generally unseen by LLMs during pre-training. Efforts have been made to mitigate this challenge via in-context learning through relevant examples or by fine-tuning. However, it suffers from problems, such as limited DSL samples and prompt sensitivity but enterprises maintain good documentation of the DSLs. Therefore, we propose DocCGen, a framework that can leverage such rich knowledge by breaking the NL-to-Code generation task for structured code languages into a two-step process. First, it detects the correct libraries using the library documentation that best matches the NL query. Then, it utilizes schema rules extracted from the documentation of these libraries to constrain the decoding. We evaluate our framework for two complex structured languages, Ansible YAML and Bash command, consisting of two settings: Out-of-domain (OOD) and In-domain (ID). Our extensive experiments show that DocCGen consistently improves different-sized language models across all six evaluation metrics, reducing syntactic and semantic errors in structured code. We plan to open-source the datasets and code to motivate research in constrained code generation.

We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding advanced coding skills in grounding and planning. Second, examples in DA-Code are all based on real and diverse data, covering a wide range of complex data wrangling and analytics tasks. Third, to solve the tasks, the models must utilize complex data science programming languages, to perform intricate data processing and derive the answers. We set up the benchmark in a controllable and executable environment that aligns with real-world data analysis scenarios and is scalable. The annotators meticulously design the evaluation suite to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the evaluation. We develop the DA-Agent baseline. Experiments show that although the baseline performs better than other existing frameworks, using the current best LLMs achieves only 30.5% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://da-code-bench.github.io.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation but require significant resources and often over-generalize, limiting their task-specific efficiency. Fine-tuning smaller, open-source LLMs provides a cost-effective alternative. However, standard supervised approaches rely only on correct examples, missing valuable insights from failures. We introduce CodeLutra, a framework that leverages both correct and incorrect code attempts. Instead of using only correct solutions, CodeLutra applies iterative preference-based refinement, comparing successful and failed outputs to better approximate desired results. This approach narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art larger models without requiring massive datasets or auxiliary models. For instance, on a challenging data science coding task, using only 500 samples improved Llama-3-8B's accuracy from 28.2% to 48.6%, approaching GPT-4's level. By learning from both successes and mistakes, CodeLutra provides a scalable and efficient path to high-quality code generation, making smaller open-source models more competitive with leading closed-source alternatives.

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code comprehension and generation tasks and sometimes even better than small SOTA models specifically fine-tuned on each downstream task. We also find that larger instructed LLMs are not always better on code-related tasks. Second, for the few-shot setting, we find that adding demonstration examples substantially helps instructed LLMs perform better on most code comprehension and generation tasks; however, the examples would sometimes induce unstable or even worse performance. Furthermore, we find widely-used BM25-based shot selection strategy significantly outperforms the basic random selection or fixed selection only on generation problems. Third, for the fine-tuning setting, we find that fine-tuning could further improve the model performance on downstream code comprehension and generation tasks compared to the zero-shot/one-shot performance. In addition, after being fine-tuned on the same downstream task dataset, instructed LLMs outperform both the small SOTA models and similar-scaled LLMs without instruction tuning. Based on our findings, we further present practical implications on model and usage recommendation, performance and cost trade-offs, and future direction.

Existing text-to-music models can produce high-quality audio with great diversity. However, textual prompts alone cannot precisely control temporal musical features such as chords and rhythm of the generated music. To address this challenge, we introduce MusiConGen, a temporally-conditioned Transformer-based text-to-music model that builds upon the pretrained MusicGen framework. Our innovation lies in an efficient finetuning mechanism, tailored for consumer-grade GPUs, that integrates automatically-extracted rhythm and chords as the condition signal. During inference, the condition can either be musical features extracted from a reference audio signal, or be user-defined symbolic chord sequence, BPM, and textual prompts. Our performance evaluation on two datasets -- one derived from extracted features and the other from user-created inputs -- demonstrates that MusiConGen can generate realistic backing track music that aligns well with the specified conditions. We open-source the code and model checkpoints, and provide audio examples online, https://musicongen.github.io/musicongen_demo/.

We present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly. Code and data for this paper are at https://wyysf-98.github.io/GenMM/

We present LL3M, a multi-agent system that leverages pretrained large language models (LLMs) to generate 3D assets by writing interpretable Python code in Blender. We break away from the typical generative approach that learns from a collection of 3D data. Instead, we reformulate shape generation as a code-writing task, enabling greater modularity, editability, and integration with artist workflows. Given a text prompt, LL3M coordinates a team of specialized LLM agents to plan, retrieve, write, debug, and refine Blender scripts that generate and edit geometry and appearance. The generated code works as a high-level, interpretable, human-readable, well-documented representation of scenes and objects, making full use of sophisticated Blender constructs (e.g. B-meshes, geometry modifiers, shader nodes) for diverse, unconstrained shapes, materials, and scenes. This code presents many avenues for further agent and human editing and experimentation via code tweaks or procedural parameters. This medium naturally enables a co-creative loop in our system: agents can automatically self-critique using code and visuals, while iterative user instructions provide an intuitive way to refine assets. A shared code context across agents enables awareness of previous attempts, and a retrieval-augmented generation knowledge base built from Blender API documentation, BlenderRAG, equips agents with examples, types, and functions empowering advanced modeling operations and code correctness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LL3M across diverse shape categories, style and material edits, and user-driven refinements. Our experiments showcase the power of code as a generative and interpretable medium for 3D asset creation. Our project page is at https://threedle.github.io/ll3m.

In this work, we build upon our previous publication and use diffusion-based generative models for speech enhancement. We present a detailed overview of the diffusion process that is based on a stochastic differential equation and delve into an extensive theoretical examination of its implications. Opposed to usual conditional generation tasks, we do not start the reverse process from pure Gaussian noise but from a mixture of noisy speech and Gaussian noise. This matches our forward process which moves from clean speech to noisy speech by including a drift term. We show that this procedure enables using only 30 diffusion steps to generate high-quality clean speech estimates. By adapting the network architecture, we are able to significantly improve the speech enhancement performance, indicating that the network, rather than the formalism, was the main limitation of our original approach. In an extensive cross-dataset evaluation, we show that the improved method can compete with recent discriminative models and achieves better generalization when evaluating on a different corpus than used for training. We complement the results with an instrumental evaluation using real-world noisy recordings and a listening experiment, in which our proposed method is rated best. Examining different sampler configurations for solving the reverse process allows us to balance the performance and computational speed of the proposed method. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is also suitable for dereverberation and thus not limited to additive background noise removal. Code and audio examples are available online, see https://github.com/sp-uhh/sgmse