KADEL: Knowledge-Aware Denoising Learning for Commit Message Generation

TL;DR

KADEL introduces a knowledge-aware denoising learning approach that leverages good-practice commit messages to improve automatic commit message generation, effectively handling noisy data and achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel method that utilizes good-practice commits for better training and introduces dynamic denoising to handle noisy data in commit message generation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on MCMD dataset.

Effectively leverages good-practice commits for training.

Dynamic denoising improves robustness against noisy data.

Abstract

Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for software evolution such as code understanding and maintenance. However, previous methods are trained on the entire dataset without considering the fact that a portion of commit messages adhere to good practice (i.e., good-practice commits), while the rest do not. On the basis of our empirical study, we discover that training on good-practice commits significantly contributes to the commit message generation. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel knowledge-aware denoising learning method called KADEL. Considering that good-practice commits constitute only a small proportion of the dataset, we align the remaining training samples with these good-practice commits. To achieve this, we propose a model that learns the commit knowledge by training on good-practice commits. This knowledge model enables supplementing more information for training samples that do not conform to good practice. However, since the supplementary information may contain noise or prediction errors, we propose a dynamic denoising training method. This method composes a distribution-aware confidence function and a dynamic distribution list, which enhances the effectiveness of the training process. Experimental results on the whole MCMD dataset demonstrate that our method overall achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with previous methods. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/KADEL