No More Fine-Tuning? An Experimental Evaluation of Prompt Tuning in Code Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates prompt tuning in code intelligence tasks, demonstrating it often surpasses fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios, by effectively leveraging task-specific prompts with pre-trained models like CodeBERT and CodeT5.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical comparison of prompt tuning versus fine-tuning in code intelligence tasks, highlighting prompt tuning's advantages in scarce data situations.

Findings

Prompt tuning outperforms fine-tuning across all tested tasks.

Significant improvements in low-resource scenarios, e.g., 26% BLEU score increase.

Prompt tuning is especially effective when task-specific data is limited.

Abstract

Pre-trained models have been shown effective in many code intelligence tasks. These models are pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus and then fine-tuned in downstream tasks. However, as the inputs to pre-training and downstream tasks are in different forms, it is hard to fully explore the knowledge of pre-trained models. Besides, the performance of fine-tuning strongly relies on the amount of downstream data, while in practice, the scenarios with scarce data are common. Recent studies in the natural language processing (NLP) field show that prompt tuning, a new paradigm for tuning, alleviates the above issues and achieves promising results in various NLP tasks. In prompt tuning, the prompts inserted during tuning provide task-specific knowledge, which is especially beneficial for tasks with relatively scarce data. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the usage and effect of prompt tuning in code intelligence tasks. We conduct prompt tuning on popular pre-trained models CodeBERT and CodeT5 and experiment with three code intelligence tasks including defect prediction, code summarization, and code translation. Our experimental results show that prompt tuning consistently outperforms fine-tuning in all three tasks. In addition, prompt tuning shows great potential in low-resource scenarios, e.g., improving the BLEU scores of fine-tuning by more than 26\% on average for code summarization. Our results suggest that instead of fine-tuning, we could adapt prompt tuning for code intelligence tasks to achieve better performance, especially when lacking task-specific data.