2024 CodeGenerationwithAlphaCodiumFr

From GM-RKB
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Subject Headings: AlphaCodium, Alpha Code 2.

Notes

  • AlphaCodium introduces a unique, test-based, multi-stage, iterative flow to improve Large Language Models' (LLMs) performance in code generation, particularly highlighting its success on the challenging CodeContests dataset.
  • The paper identifies the specific challenges of code generation, such as the need for exact syntax and the difficulty in evaluating partial or incorrect solutions, which differ significantly from natural language tasks.
  • AlphaCodium's process includes pre-processing for natural language reasoning about the problem, followed by iterative code generation and fixing stages using additional AI-generated tests.
  • It emphasizes a code-oriented design with features like YAML structured output, modular generation, and soft decisions to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of code solutions.
  • The results show that AlphaCodium significantly improves LLMs' performance on complex coding problems, outperforming previous methods using fewer computational resources.
  • The approach is practical across various open-source and closed-source models and demonstrates superior pass rates and computational efficiency compared to direct prompt solutions.
  • The paper concludes that AlphaCodium's principles and practices broadly apply to general code generation tasks, suggesting a new paradigm in handling code problems with LLMs.

Cited By

Quotes

Abstract

Code generation problems differ from common natural language problems - they require matching the exact syntax of the target language, identifying happy paths and edge cases, paying attention to numerous small details in the problem spec, and addressing other code-specific issues and requirements. Hence, many of the optimizations and tricks that have been successful in natural language generation may not be effective for code tasks. In this work, we propose a new approach to code generation by LLMs, which we call AlphaCodium - a test-based, multi-stage, code-oriented iterative flow, that improves the performances of LLMs on code problems. We tested AlphaCodium on a challenging code generation dataset called CodeContests, which includes competitive programming problems from platforms such as Codeforces. The proposed flow consistently and significantly improves results. On the validation set, for example, GPT-4 accuracy (pass@5) increased from 19% with a single well-designed direct prompt to 44% with the AlphaCodium flow. Many of the principles and best practices acquired in this work, we believe, are broadly applicable to general code generation tasks. Full implementation is available at: this https URL.

References

  1. (Austin et al., 2021) ⇒ Jacob Austin, Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Maarten Bosma, Henryk Michalewski, David Dohan, Ellen Jiang, Carrie Cai, Michael Terry, Quoc Le, et al. (2021). "Program Synthesis with Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07732.
  2. (Chen et al., 2021) ⇒ Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, Qiming Yuan, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Jared Kaplan, Harri Edwards, Yuri Burda, Nicholas Joseph, Greg Brockman, et al. (2021). "Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code." arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03374.
  3. (DeepSeek, 2023) ⇒ DeepSeek. (2023). "DeepSeek Coder: Let the Code Write Itself."
  4. (Dhuliawala et al., 2023) ⇒ Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Mojtaba Komeili, Jing Xu, Roberta Raileanu, Xian Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston. (2023). "Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.11495.
  5. (Floridi & Chiriatti, 2020) ⇒ Luciano Floridi, and Massimo Chiriatti. (2020). "GPT-3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences." Minds and Machines, 30: 681–694.
  6. (Hendrycks et al., 2021) ⇒ Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart, Saurav Kadavath, Mantas Mazeika, Akul Arora, Ethan Guo, Collin Burns, Samir Puranik, Horace He, Dawn Song, et al. (2021). "Measuring Coding Challenge Competence with Apps." arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09938.
  7. (Le et al., 2023) ⇒ Hung Le, Hailin Chen, Amrita Saha, Akash Gokul, Doyen Sahoo, Shafiq Joty. (2023). "CodeChain: Towards Modular Code Generation through Chain of Self-revisions with Representative Sub-Modules." arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08992.
  8. (Li et al., 2022) ⇒ Yujia Li, David Choi, Junyoung Chung, Nate Kushman, Julian Schrittwieser, Rémi Leblond, Tom Eccles, James Keeling, Felix Gimeno, Agustin Dal Lago, et al. (2022). “Competition-level Code Generation with Alphacode.” Science 378, no. 6624
  9. (Mirzayanov et al., 2020) ⇒ Mike Mirzayanov, Oksana Pavlova, Pavel Mavrin, Roman Melnikov, Andrew Plotnikov, Vladimir Parfenov, Andrew Stankevich. (2020). "Codeforces as an Educational Platform for Learning Programming in Digitalization." Olympiads in Informatics, 14(133-142): 14.
  10. (Nori et al., 2023) ⇒ Harsha Nori, Yin Tat Lee, Sheng Zhang, Dean Carignan, Richard Edgar, Nicolo Fusi, Nicholas King, Jonathan Larson, Yuanzhi Li, Weishung Liu, et al. (2023). "Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine." arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.16452.
  11. (Gemini Team et al., 2023) ⇒ Gemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud, Yonghui Wu, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jiahui Yu, Radu Soricut, Johan Schalkwyk, Andrew M Dai, Anja Hauth, et al. (2023). "Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.11805.
  12. (Vaswani et al., 2017) ⇒ Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin. (2017). "Attention Is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
  13. (Wang et al., 2022) ⇒ Xuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc Le, Ed Chi, Sharan Narang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou. (2022). "Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11171.;


 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2024 CodeGenerationwithAlphaCodiumFrTal Ridnik
Dedy Kredo
Itamar Friedman
Code Generation with AlphaCodium: From Prompt Engineering to Flow Engineering10.48550/arXiv.2401.085002024