A study on robustness and reliability of large language model code generation

The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes, etc. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, researchers from UCSD propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. By collecting 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs, they evaluate them on popular LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Llama2, Vicuna. The evaluation results show that even for GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses, which would cause severe consequences if the code is introduced into real-world software.

Garbage in, garbage out. I wonder if it can contextualize the code in StackOverflow questions (i.e. why doesn't this work?) as bad and that in highly rated answers as good, or "code is code".

Ok but what are we calling API misuses?

    We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

Should have used ChatGPT to correct those sentences. /s

What do we consider an API misuse at the end of the day? And also against the Java APIs... Which are some of the oldest.

I'm not saying ChatGPT answers work, 50% of the time they don't work out of the box. But overal, the time savings are incredible, compared to the fossil digging way of googling. And I value the time savings towards the equally correct way of googling for answers. You reap what you sow. The knowledge the LLM is based upon is the same stuff you used to distill manually. It shouldn't be more or less correct, if you think of it that way.

Surprise, ChatGPT will not replace devs. But it is like having the electrical drill vs. screwdriver type of situation.

Why not ?