UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation

TL;DR

UniXcoder is a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming languages that effectively combines code, comments, and ASTs to improve performance on various code understanding and generation tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unified encoder-decoder framework with cross-modal learning and a new method for encoding ASTs as sequences, enhancing code representation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple code tasks

Effectively leverages comments and ASTs for improved performance

Introduces zero-shot code-to-code search dataset

Abstract

Pre-trained models for programming languages have recently demonstrated great success on code intelligence. To support both code-related understanding and generation tasks, recent works attempt to pre-train unified encoder-decoder models. However, such encoder-decoder framework is sub-optimal for auto-regressive tasks, especially code completion that requires a decoder-only manner for efficient inference. In this paper, we present UniXcoder, a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming language. The model utilizes mask attention matrices with prefix adapters to control the behavior of the model and leverages cross-modal contents like AST and code comment to enhance code representation. To encode AST that is represented as a tree in parallel, we propose a one-to-one mapping method to transform AST in a sequence structure that retains all structural information from the tree. Furthermore, we propose to utilize multi-modal contents to learn representation of code fragment with contrastive learning, and then align representations among programming languages using a cross-modal generation task. We evaluate UniXcoder on five code-related tasks over nine datasets. To further evaluate the performance of code fragment representation, we also construct a dataset for a new task, called zero-shot code-to-code search. Results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on most tasks and analysis reveals that comment and AST can both enhance UniXcoder.