Improving the Ability of Pre-trained Language Model by Imparting Large Language Model's Experience

TL;DR

This paper proposes leveraging large language models to generate domain-specific data, significantly improving the performance of pre-trained language models on software engineering tasks like fault localization and clone detection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of using LLMs to generate training data for enhancing pre-trained LMs on non-generative software engineering tasks.

Findings

LLM-generated data significantly improves model performance.

Up to 58.36% improvement in fault localization.

Up to 6.09% improvement in clone detection.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive success on many software engineering tasks (e.g., code completion and code generation). By leveraging huge existing code corpora (e.g., GitHub), these models can understand the patterns in source code and use these patterns to predict code properties. However, LLMs under few-shot learning perform poorly on non-generative tasks (e.g., fault localization and vulnerability localization), and fine-tuning LLMs is time-consuming and costly for end users and small organizations. Furthermore, the performance of fine-tuning LMs for non-generative tasks is impressive, yet it heavily depends on the amount and quality of data. As a result, the current lack of data and the high cost of collecting it in real-world scenarios further limit the applicability of LMs. In this paper, we leverage the powerful generation capabilities of LLMs to enhance pre-trained LMs. Specifically, we use LLMs to generate domain-specific data, thereby improving the performance of pre-trained LMs on the target tasks. We conduct experiments by combining different LLMs in our generation phase and introducing various LMs to learn from the LLM-generated data. Then, we compare the performance of these LMs before and after learning the data. We find that LLM-generated data significantly enhances the performance of LMs. The improvement can reach up to 58.36% for fault localization and up to 6.09% for clone detection.