Towards an Understanding of Large Language Models in Software Engineering Tasks

Kailong Wang Xinying Hou Yue Liu + 6 lainnya

21 Agustus 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted numerous domains, including Software Engineering (SE). Many recent publications have explored LLMs applied to various SE tasks. Nevertheless, a comprehensive understanding of the application, effects, and possible limitations of LLMs on SE is still in its early stages. To bridge this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) on LLM4SE, with a particular focus on understanding how LLMs can be exploited to optimize processes and outcomes. We selected and analyzed 395 research papers from January 2017 to January 2024 to answer four key research questions (RQs). In RQ1, we categorize different LLMs that have been employed in SE tasks, characterizing their distinctive features and uses. In RQ2, we analyze the methods used in data collection, preprocessing, and application, highlighting the role of well-curated datasets for successful LLM for SE implementation. RQ3 investigates the strategies employed to optimize and evaluate the performance of LLMs in SE. Finally, RQ4 examines the specific SE tasks where LLMs have shown success to date, illustrating their practical contributions to the field. From the answers to these RQs, we discuss the current state-of-the-art and trends, identifying gaps in existing research, and highlighting promising areas for future study. Our artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/xinyi-hou/LLM4SE_SLR .

Mark Harman Shubho Sengupta Angela Fan + 4 lainnya

14 Mei 2023

This paper provides a survey of the emerging area of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Software Engineering (SE). It also sets out open research challenges for the application of LLMs to technical problems faced by software engineers. LLMs' emergent properties bring novelty and creativity with applications right across the spectrum of Software Engineering activities including coding, design, requirements, repair, refactoring, performance improvement, documentation and analytics. However, these very same emergent properties also pose significant technical challenges; we need techniques that can reliably weed out incorrect solutions, such as hallucinations. Our survey reveals the pivotal role that hybrid techniques (traditional SE plus LLMs) have to play in the development and deployment of reliable, efficient and effective LLM-based SE.

Weisong Sun Quanjun Zhang Yang Xie + 5 lainnya

23 Desember 2023

Software Engineering (SE) is the systematic design, development, maintenance, and management of software applications underpinning the digital infrastructure of our modern world. Very recently, the SE community has seen a rapidly increasing number of techniques employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate a broad range of SE tasks. Nevertheless, existing information of the applications, effects, and possible limitations of LLMs within SE is still not well-studied. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the LLM-based SE community. We summarize 62 representative LLMs of Code across three model architectures, 15 pre-training objectives across four categories, and 16 downstream tasks across five categories. We then present a detailed summarization of the recent SE studies for which LLMs are commonly utilized, including 947 studies for 112 specific code-related tasks across five crucial phases within the SE workflow. We also discuss several critical aspects during the integration of LLMs into SE, such as empirical evaluation, benchmarking, security and reliability, domain tuning, compressing and distillation. Finally, we highlight several challenges and potential opportunities on applying LLMs for future SE studies, such as exploring domain LLMs and constructing clean evaluation datasets. Overall, our work can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the achievements of the existing LLM-based SE studies and promote the practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available and will be continuously updated at the living repository: https://github.com/iSEngLab/AwesomeLLM4SE.

Maleknaz Nayebi Song Wang Clark Tang + 3 lainnya

2023

The advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened up new opportunities for Automated Software Engineering (ASE). Two orthogonal approaches have been widely used to customize LLMs for ASE tasks, i.e., prompt engineering and fine-tuning. Prompt engineering-based approaches leverage different prompting strategies to query LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT ) to automate a task such as code generation, while fine-tuning-based approaches further train the pre-trained models (e.g., CodeBERT ) on customized data related to the down-stream task (in this example, code generation datasets). However, to date, there is no comprehensive and in-depth analysis of these two orthogonal approaches, in the ASE literature. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art LLM, i.e., GPT-4 , with three different prompting engineering techniques (i.e., basic prompting, in-context learning, and task-specific prompting) against 18 fine-tuned LLMs on three typical ASE tasks, i.e., code generation, code summarization, and code translation. Our quantitative analysis of these prompting strategies suggests that prompt engineering GPT-4 cannot necessarily and significantly outperform fine-tuning smaller/older LLMs in all three tasks. For comment generation, GPT-4 with the best prompting strategy (i.e., task-specific prompt) had outperformed the first-ranked fine-tuned model by 8.33% points on average in BLEU. However, for code generation, the first-ranked fine-tuned model outperforms GPT-4 with best prompting by 16.61% and 28.3% points, on average in BLEU. For code translation, GPT-4 and fine-tuned baselines tie as they outperform each other on different translation tasks. To explore the impact of different prompting strategies, we conducted a user study with 27 graduate students and 10 industry practitioners. From our qualitative analysis, we find that the GPT-4 with conversational prompts (i

Ashkan Sami Jasmin Jahić

4 Juni 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) are finding their way into Software Engineering by assisting with tasks such as code generation. Furthermore, LLMs might have a potential to perform even more complex tasks, such as suggesting architectural design. However, there is a lack of empirical surveys on how software engineering companies use (and plan to use) LLMs and if LLMs truly can provide benefits to software architects. To understand the state of practice considering adoption of LLMs in software engineering, existing challenges, and future trends, we have surveyed 15 different software engineering companies. To understand the ability of LLMs to perform more complex tasks, we report on our experiments with LLM-assisted architectural design. We applied ChatGPT on 5 software projects and in total performed 50 different experiments. Our results capture the state of the practice of LLMs in software engineering and demonstrate how LLMs perform when assisting with (more complex task such as) architectural design. Engineers, architects, and project managers should profit from these results to guide their decision towards targeted adoption of LLMs in their business and engineering domains.