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Jan 16

Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale

Sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been widely adopted to scale deep learning models to trillion-plus parameters with fixed computational cost. The algorithmic performance of MoE relies on its token routing mechanism that forwards each input token to the right sub-models or experts. While token routing dynamically determines the amount of expert workload at runtime, existing systems suffer inefficient computation due to their static execution, namely static parallelism and pipelining, which does not adapt to the dynamic workload. We present Flex, a highly scalable stack design and implementation for MoE with dynamically adaptive parallelism and pipelining. Flex designs an identical layout for distributing MoE model parameters and input data, which can be leveraged by all possible parallelism or pipelining methods without any mathematical inequivalence or tensor migration overhead. This enables adaptive parallelism/pipelining optimization at zero cost during runtime. Based on this key design, Flex also implements various MoE acceleration techniques. Aggregating all techniques, Flex finally delivers huge speedup at any scale -- 4.96x and 5.75x speedup of a single MoE layer over 16 and 2,048 A100 GPUs, respectively, over the previous state-of-the-art. Our evaluation shows that Flex efficiently and effectively runs a real-world MoE-based model named SwinV2-MoE, built upon Swin Transformer V2, a state-of-the-art computer vision architecture. On efficiency, Flex accelerates SwinV2-MoE, achieving up to 1.55x and 2.11x speedup in training and inference over Fairseq, respectively. On effectiveness, the SwinV2-MoE model achieves superior accuracy in both pre-training and down-stream computer vision tasks such as COCO object detection than the counterpart dense model, indicating the readiness of Flex for end-to-end real-world model training and inference.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 7, 2022

Integrating Summarization and Retrieval for Enhanced Personalization via Large Language Models

Personalization, the ability to tailor a system to individual users, is an essential factor in user experience with natural language processing (NLP) systems. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question is how to leverage these models to better personalize user experiences. To personalize a language model's output, a straightforward approach is to incorporate past user data into the language model prompt, but this approach can result in lengthy inputs exceeding limitations on input length and incurring latency and cost issues. Existing approaches tackle such challenges by selectively extracting relevant user data (i.e. selective retrieval) to construct a prompt for downstream tasks. However, retrieval-based methods are limited by potential information loss, lack of more profound user understanding, and cold-start challenges. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel summary-augmented approach by extending retrieval-augmented personalization with task-aware user summaries generated by LLMs. The summaries can be generated and stored offline, enabling real-world systems with runtime constraints like voice assistants to leverage the power of LLMs. Experiments show our method with 75% less of retrieved user data is on-par or outperforms retrieval augmentation on most tasks in the LaMP personalization benchmark. We demonstrate that offline summarization via LLMs and runtime retrieval enables better performance for personalization on a range of tasks under practical constraints.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2023

CARMA: Context-Aware Runtime Reconfiguration for Energy-Efficient Sensor Fusion

Autonomous systems (AS) are systems that can adapt and change their behavior in response to unanticipated events and include systems such as aerial drones, autonomous vehicles, and ground/aquatic robots. AS require a wide array of sensors, deep-learning models, and powerful hardware platforms to perceive and safely operate in real-time. However, in many contexts, some sensing modalities negatively impact perception while increasing the system's overall energy consumption. Since AS are often energy-constrained edge devices, energy-efficient sensor fusion methods have been proposed. However, existing methods either fail to adapt to changing scenario conditions or to optimize energy efficiency system-wide. We propose CARMA: a context-aware sensor fusion approach that uses context to dynamically reconfigure the computation flow on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at runtime. By clock-gating unused sensors and model sub-components, CARMA significantly reduces the energy used by a multi-sensory object detector without compromising performance. We use a Deep-learning Processor Unit (DPU) based reconfiguration approach to minimize the latency of model reconfiguration. We evaluate multiple context-identification strategies, propose a novel system-wide energy-performance joint optimization, and evaluate scenario-specific perception performance. Across challenging real-world sensing contexts, CARMA outperforms state-of-the-art methods with up to 1.3x speedup and 73% lower energy consumption.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

Model Context Protocol for Vision Systems: Audit, Security, and Protocol Extensions

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) defines a schema bound execution model for agent-tool interaction, enabling modular computer vision workflows without retraining. To our knowledge, this is the first protocol level, deployment scale audit of MCP in vision systems, identifying systemic weaknesses in schema semantics, interoperability, and runtime coordination. We analyze 91 publicly registered vision centric MCP servers, annotated along nine dimensions of compositional fidelity, and develop an executable benchmark with validators to detect and categorize protocol violations. The audit reveals high prevalence of schema format divergence, missing runtime schema validation, undeclared coordinate conventions, and reliance on untracked bridging scripts. Validator based testing quantifies these failures, with schema format checks flagging misalignments in 78.0 percent of systems, coordinate convention checks detecting spatial reference errors in 24.6 percent, and memory scope checks issuing an average of 33.8 warnings per 100 executions. Security probes show that dynamic and multi agent workflows exhibit elevated risks of privilege escalation and untyped tool connections. The proposed benchmark and validator suite, implemented in a controlled testbed and to be released on GitHub, establishes a reproducible framework for measuring and improving the reliability and security of compositional vision workflows.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

GoEX: Perspectives and Designs Towards a Runtime for Autonomous LLM Applications

Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving beyond their classical role of providing information within dialogue systems to actively engaging with tools and performing actions on real-world applications and services. Today, humans verify the correctness and appropriateness of the LLM-generated outputs (e.g., code, functions, or actions) before putting them into real-world execution. This poses significant challenges as code comprehension is well known to be notoriously difficult. In this paper, we study how humans can efficiently collaborate with, delegate to, and supervise autonomous LLMs in the future. We argue that in many cases, "post-facto validation" - verifying the correctness of a proposed action after seeing the output - is much easier than the aforementioned "pre-facto validation" setting. The core concept behind enabling a post-facto validation system is the integration of an intuitive undo feature, and establishing a damage confinement for the LLM-generated actions as effective strategies to mitigate the associated risks. Using this, a human can now either revert the effect of an LLM-generated output or be confident that the potential risk is bounded. We believe this is critical to unlock the potential for LLM agents to interact with applications and services with limited (post-facto) human involvement. We describe the design and implementation of our open-source runtime for executing LLM actions, Gorilla Execution Engine (GoEX), and present open research questions towards realizing the goal of LLMs and applications interacting with each other with minimal human supervision. We release GoEX at https://github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla/.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 10, 2024

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to transform the research process as we know it by automating the discovery of new solutions. Given a task, the typical AI-driven approach is (i) to generate a set of diverse solutions, and then (ii) to verify these solutions and select one that solves the problem. Crucially, this approach assumes the existence of a reliable verifier, i.e., one that can accurately determine whether a solution solves the given problem. We argue that systems research, long focused on designing and evaluating new performance-oriented algorithms, is particularly well-suited for AI-driven solution discovery. This is because system performance problems naturally admit reliable verifiers: solutions are typically implemented in real systems or simulators, and verification reduces to running these software artifacts against predefined workloads and measuring performance. We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions. Using penEvolve, an existing open-source ADRS instance, we present case studies across diverse domains, including load balancing for multi-region cloud scheduling, Mixture-of-Experts inference, LLM-based SQL queries, and transaction scheduling. In multiple instances, ADRS discovers algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art human designs (e.g., achieving up to 5.0x runtime improvements or 50% cost reductions). We distill best practices for guiding algorithm evolution, from prompt design to evaluator construction, for existing frameworks. We then discuss the broader implications for the systems community: as AI assumes a central role in algorithm design, we argue that human researchers will increasingly focus on problem formulation and strategic guidance. Our results highlight both the disruptive potential and the urgent need to adapt systems research practices in the age of AI.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025 1

SAFEFLOW: A Principled Protocol for Trustworthy and Transactional Autonomous Agent Systems

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled powerful autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-modal tool use. Despite their growing capabilities, today's agent frameworks remain fragile, lacking principled mechanisms for secure information flow, reliability, and multi-agent coordination. In this work, we introduce SAFEFLOW, a new protocol-level framework for building trustworthy LLM/VLM-based agents. SAFEFLOW enforces fine-grained information flow control (IFC), precisely tracking provenance, integrity, and confidentiality of all the data exchanged between agents, tools, users, and environments. By constraining LLM reasoning to respect these security labels, SAFEFLOW prevents untrusted or adversarial inputs from contaminating high-integrity decisions. To ensure robustness in concurrent multi-agent settings, SAFEFLOW introduces transactional execution, conflict resolution, and secure scheduling over shared state, preserving global consistency across agents. We further introduce mechanisms, including write-ahead logging, rollback, and secure caches, that further enhance resilience against runtime errors and policy violations. To validate the performances, we built SAFEFLOWBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate agent reliability under adversarial, noisy, and concurrent operational conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that agents built with SAFEFLOW maintain impressive task performance and security guarantees even in hostile environments, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art. Together, SAFEFLOW and SAFEFLOWBENCH lay the groundwork for principled, robust, and secure agent ecosystems, advancing the frontier of reliable autonomy.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025 2

Logzip: Extracting Hidden Structures via Iterative Clustering for Log Compression

System logs record detailed runtime information of software systems and are used as the main data source for many tasks around software engineering. As modern software systems are evolving into large scale and complex structures, logs have become one type of fast-growing big data in industry. In particular, such logs often need to be stored for a long time in practice (e.g., a year), in order to analyze recurrent problems or track security issues. However, archiving logs consumes a large amount of storage space and computing resources, which in turn incurs high operational cost. Data compression is essential to reduce the cost of log storage. Traditional compression tools (e.g., gzip) work well for general texts, but are not tailed for system logs. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective log compression method, namely logzip. Logzip is capable of extracting hidden structures from raw logs via fast iterative clustering and further generating coherent intermediate representations that allow for more effective compression. We evaluate logzip on five large log datasets of different system types, with a total of 63.6 GB in size. The results show that logzip can save about half of the storage space on average over traditional compression tools. Meanwhile, the design of logzip is highly parallel and only incurs negligible overhead. In addition, we share our industrial experience of applying logzip to Huawei's real products.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 23, 2019

Peregrine: A Pattern-Aware Graph Mining System

Graph mining workloads aim to extract structural properties of a graph by exploring its subgraph structures. General purpose graph mining systems provide a generic runtime to explore subgraph structures of interest with the help of user-defined functions that guide the overall exploration process. However, the state-of-the-art graph mining systems remain largely oblivious to the shape (or pattern) of the subgraphs that they mine. This causes them to: (a) explore unnecessary subgraphs; (b) perform expensive computations on the explored subgraphs; and, (c) hold intermediate partial subgraphs in memory; all of which affect their overall performance. Furthermore, their programming models are often tied to their underlying exploration strategies, which makes it difficult for domain users to express complex mining tasks. In this paper, we develop Peregrine, a pattern-aware graph mining system that directly explores the subgraphs of interest while avoiding exploration of unnecessary subgraphs, and simultaneously bypassing expensive computations throughout the mining process. We design a pattern-based programming model that treats "graph patterns" as first class constructs and enables Peregrine to extract the semantics of patterns, which it uses to guide its exploration. Our evaluation shows that Peregrine outperforms state-of-the-art distributed and single machine graph mining systems, and scales to complex mining tasks on larger graphs, while retaining simplicity and expressivity with its "pattern-first" programming approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 5, 2020

Tools and Benchmarks for Automated Log Parsing

Logs are imperative in the development and maintenance process of many software systems. They record detailed runtime information that allows developers and support engineers to monitor their systems and dissect anomalous behaviors and errors. The increasing scale and complexity of modern software systems, however, make the volume of logs explodes. In many cases, the traditional way of manual log inspection becomes impractical. Many recent studies, as well as industrial tools, resort to powerful text search and machine learning-based analytics solutions. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, a first crucial step is to parse log messages into structured data for subsequent analysis. In recent years, automated log parsing has been widely studied in both academia and industry, producing a series of log parsers by different techniques. To better understand the characteristics of these log parsers, in this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation study on automated log parsing and further release the tools and benchmarks for easy reuse. More specifically, we evaluate 13 log parsers on a total of 16 log datasets spanning distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. We report the benchmarking results in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, which are of practical importance when deploying automated log parsing in production. We also share the success stories and lessons learned in an industrial application at Huawei. We believe that our work could serve as the basis and provide valuable guidance to future research and deployment of automated log parsing.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 8, 2018 1

FastPathology: An open-source platform for deep learning-based research and decision support in digital pathology

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the current state-of-the-art for digital analysis of histopathological images. The large size of whole-slide microscopy images (WSIs) requires advanced memory handling to read, display and process these images. There are several open-source platforms for working with WSIs, but few support deployment of CNN models. These applications use third-party solutions for inference, making them less user-friendly and unsuitable for high-performance image analysis. To make deployment of CNNs user-friendly and feasible on low-end machines, we have developed a new platform, FastPathology, using the FAST framework and C++. It minimizes memory usage for reading and processing WSIs, deployment of CNN models, and real-time interactive visualization of results. Runtime experiments were conducted on four different use cases, using different architectures, inference engines, hardware configurations and operating systems. Memory usage for reading, visualizing, zooming and panning a WSI were measured, using FastPathology and three existing platforms. FastPathology performed similarly in terms of memory to the other C++ based application, while using considerably less than the two Java-based platforms. The choice of neural network model, inference engine, hardware and processors influenced runtime considerably. Thus, FastPathology includes all steps needed for efficient visualization and processing of WSIs in a single application, including inference of CNNs with real-time display of the results. Source code, binary releases and test data can be found online on GitHub at https://github.com/SINTEFMedtek/FAST-Pathology/.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 11, 2020

Universal Fuzzing via Large Language Models

Fuzzing has achieved tremendous success in discovering bugs and vulnerabilities in various software systems. Systems under test (SUTs) that take in programming or formal language as inputs, e.g., compilers, runtime engines, constraint solvers, and software libraries with accessible APIs, are especially important as they are fundamental building blocks of software development. However, existing fuzzers for such systems often target a specific language, and thus cannot be easily applied to other languages or even other versions of the same language. Moreover, the inputs generated by existing fuzzers are often limited to specific features of the input language, and thus can hardly reveal bugs related to other or new features. This paper presents Fuzz4All, the first fuzzer that is universal in the sense that it can target many different input languages and many different features of these languages. The key idea behind Fuzz4All is to leverage large language models (LLMs) as an input generation and mutation engine, which enables the approach to produce diverse and realistic inputs for any practically relevant language. To realize this potential, we present a novel autoprompting technique, which creates LLM prompts that are wellsuited for fuzzing, and a novel LLM-powered fuzzing loop, which iteratively updates the prompt to create new fuzzing inputs. We evaluate Fuzz4All on nine systems under test that take in six different languages (C, C++, Go, SMT2, Java and Python) as inputs. The evaluation shows, across all six languages, that universal fuzzing achieves higher coverage than existing, language-specific fuzzers. Furthermore, Fuzz4All has identified 76 bugs in widely used systems, such as GCC, Clang, Z3, CVC5, OpenJDK, and the Qiskit quantum computing platform, with 47 bugs already confirmed by developers as previously unknown.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 9, 2023

LLM-Based Generalizable Hierarchical Task Planning and Execution for Heterogeneous Robot Teams with Event-Driven Replanning

This paper introduces CoMuRoS (Collaborative Multi-Robot System), a generalizable hierarchical architecture for heterogeneous robot teams that unifies centralized deliberation with decentralized execution, and supports event-driven replanning. A Task Manager LLM interprets natural-language goals, classifies tasks, and allocates subtasks using static rules plus dynamic contexts (task, history, robot and task status, and events).Each robot runs a local LLM that composes executable Python code from primitive skills (ROS2 nodes, policies), while onboard perception (VLMs/image processing) continuously monitors events and classifies them into relevant or irrelevant to the task. Task failures or user intent changes trigger replanning, allowing robots to assist teammates, resume tasks, or request human help. Hardware studies demonstrate autonomous recovery from disruptive events, filtering of irrelevant distractions, and tightly coordinated transport with emergent human-robot cooperation (e.g., multirobot collaborative object recovery success rate: 9/10, coordinated transport: 8/8, human-assisted recovery: 5/5).Simulation studies show intention-aware replanning. A curated textual benchmark spanning 22 scenarios (3 tasks each, around 20 robots) evaluates task allocation, classification, IoU, executability, and correctness, with high average scores (e.g., correctness up to 0.91) across multiple LLMs, a separate replanning set (5 scenarios) achieves 1.0 correctness. Compared with prior LLM-based systems, CoMuRoS uniquely demonstrates runtime, event-driven replanning on physical robots, delivering robust, flexible multi-robot and human-robot collaboration.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025

Boosting Large-scale Parallel Training Efficiency with C4: A Communication-Driven Approach

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of parallel training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, we have found that the efficiency of current parallel training is often suboptimal, largely due to the following two main issues. Firstly, hardware failures are inevitable, leading to interruptions in the training tasks. The inability to quickly identify the faulty components results in a substantial waste of GPU resources. Secondly, since GPUs must wait for parameter synchronization to complete before proceeding to the next round of computation, network congestions can greatly increase the waiting time for GPUs. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are two folds. First, in parallel training, collective communication exhibits periodic and homogeneous characteristics, so any anomalies are certainly due to some form of hardware malfunction. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving few large flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing network congestion. C4 has been extensively implemented across our production systems, cutting error-induced overhead by roughly 30% and enhancing runtime performance by about 15% for certain applications with moderate communication costs.

  • 25 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

ByteCheckpoint: A Unified Checkpointing System for Large Foundation Model Development

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved checkpoints are dispatched to evaluation tasks or transferred across different training stages (e.g., from pre-training to post-training). All these scenarios require resharding distributed checkpoints from one parallelism to another. In production environments, different LFMs are trained with various frameworks and storage backends, depending on model sizes and training scales. A high-performance checkpointing system is needed to enable efficient checkpoint management at scale throughout the lifecycle of LFM development. We introduce ByteCheckpoint, an industrial-grade checkpointing system for large-scale LFM training. ByteCheckpoint features: a parallelism-agnostic checkpoint representation that enables efficient load-time checkpoint resharding; a generic checkpoint saving/loading workflow to accommodate multiple training frameworks and support different storage backends; full-stack optimizations to ensure high I/O efficiency and scalability; a suite of monitoring tools to streamline large-scale performance analysis and bottleneck detection. Compared to existing open-source checkpointing systems [52, 58], ByteCheckpoint significantly reduces runtime checkpoint stalls, achieving an average reduction of 54.20x. For saving and loading times, ByteCheckpoint achieves improvements of up to 9.96x and 8.80x, respectively.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 29, 2024

Rethinking Autonomy: Preventing Failures in AI-Driven Software Engineering

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

Dissecting the Runtime Performance of the Training, Fine-tuning, and Inference of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen great advance in both academia and industry, and their popularity results in numerous open-source frameworks and techniques in accelerating LLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Training and deploying LLMs are expensive as it requires considerable computing resources and memory, hence many efficient approaches have been developed for improving system pipelines as well as operators. However, the runtime performance can vary significantly across hardware and software stacks, which makes it difficult to choose the best configuration. In this work, we aim to benchmark the performance from both macro and micro perspectives. First, we benchmark the end-to-end performance of pre-training, fine-tuning, and serving LLMs in different sizes , i.e., 7, 13, and 70 billion parameters (7B, 13B, and 70B) on three 8-GPU platforms with and without individual optimization techniques, including ZeRO, quantization, recomputation, FlashAttention. Then, we dive deeper to provide a detailed runtime analysis of the sub-modules, including computing and communication operators in LLMs. For end users, our benchmark and findings help better understand different optimization techniques, training and inference frameworks, together with hardware platforms in choosing configurations for deploying LLMs. For researchers, our in-depth module-wise analyses discover potential opportunities for future work to further optimize the runtime performance of LLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023

Flexible Non-intrusive Dynamic Instrumentation for WebAssembly

A key strength of managed runtimes over hardware is the ability to gain detailed insight into the dynamic execution of programs with instrumentation. Analyses such as code coverage, execution frequency, tracing, and debugging, are all made easier in a virtual setting. As a portable, low-level bytecode, WebAssembly offers inexpensive in-process sandboxing with high performance. Yet to date, Wasm engines have not offered much insight into executing programs, supporting at best bytecode-level stepping and basic source maps, but no instrumentation capabilities. In this paper, we show the first non-intrusive dynamic instrumentation system for WebAssembly in the open-source Wizard Research Engine. Our innovative design offers a flexible, complete hierarchy of instrumentation primitives that support building high-level, complex analyses in terms of low-level, programmable probes. In contrast to emulation or machine code instrumentation, injecting probes at the bytecode level increases expressiveness and vastly simplifies the implementation by reusing the engine's JIT compiler, interpreter, and deoptimization mechanism rather than building new ones. Wizard supports both dynamic instrumentation insertion and removal while providing consistency guarantees, which is key to composing multiple analyses without interference. We detail a fully-featured implementation in a high-performance multi-tier Wasm engine, show novel optimizations specifically designed to minimize instrumentation overhead, and evaluate performance characteristics under load from various analyses. This design is well-suited for production engine adoption as probes can be implemented to have no impact on production performance when not in use.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

SysLLMatic: Large Language Models are Software System Optimizers

Automatic software system optimization can improve software speed, reduce operating costs, and save energy. Traditional approaches to optimization rely on manual tuning and compiler heuristics, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse codebases and system contexts. Recent methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation to address these limitations, but often fail to scale to the complexity of real-world software systems and applications. We present SysLLMatic, a system that integrates LLMs with profiling-guided feedback and system performance insights to automatically optimize software code. We evaluate it on three benchmark suites: HumanEval_CPP (competitive programming in C++), SciMark2 (scientific kernels in Java), and DaCapoBench (large-scale software systems in Java). Results show that SysLLMatic can improve system performance, including latency, throughput, energy efficiency, memory usage, and CPU utilization. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM baselines on microbenchmarks. On large-scale application codes, it surpasses traditional compiler optimizations, achieving average relative improvements of 1.85x in latency and 2.24x in throughput. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs, guided by principled systems thinking and appropriate performance diagnostics, can serve as viable software system optimizers. We further identify limitations of our approach and the challenges involved in handling complex applications. This work provides a foundation for generating optimized code across various languages, benchmarks, and program sizes in a principled manner.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025

Cheaply Evaluating Inference Efficiency Metrics for Autoregressive Transformer APIs

Large language models (LLMs) power many state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing. However, these models are extremely computationally expensive, even at inference time, raising the natural question: when is the extra cost of deploying a larger model worth the anticipated boost in capabilities? Better understanding this tradeoff fundamentally could benefit from an inference efficiency metric that is both (i) easily comparable across models from different providers, and (ii) representative of the true cost of running queries in an isolated performance environment. Unfortunately, access to LLMs today is largely restricted to black-box text generation APIs and raw runtimes measured through this interface do not satisfy these desiderata: model providers can apply various software and hardware optimizations orthogonal to the model, and models served on shared infrastructure are susceptible to performance contention. To circumvent these problems, we propose a new metric for comparing inference efficiency across models. This metric puts models on equal footing as though they were served (i) on uniform hardware and software, and (ii) without performance contention. We call this metric the idealized runtime, and we propose a methodology to efficiently estimate this metric for autoregressive Transformer models. We also propose cost-aware variants that incorporate the number of accelerators needed to serve the model. Using these metrics, we compare ten state-of-the-art LLMs to provide the first analysis of inference efficiency-capability tradeoffs; we make several observations from this analysis, including the fact that the superior inference runtime performance of certain APIs is often a byproduct of optimizations within the API rather than the underlying model. Our methodology also facilitates the efficient comparison of different software and hardware stacks.

  • 6 authors
·
May 3, 2023

Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025 1

MRG-Bench: Evaluating and Exploring the Requirements of Context for Repository-Level Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation. However, current evaluation datasets suffer from issues such as the lack of runnable test cases, deviation from the distribution of real-world code, and the ability to evaluate only the Python language. These limitations undermine the credibility of the evaluation results. To address these limitations, we introduce MRG-Bench (Multi-language Repository-level Code Generation Benchmark), a novel dataset that provides a more accurate evaluation of LLMs in practical repository-level code generation tasks. MRG-Bench has three main features: (1) practical data sourced from real-world code repositories that align to the practical distribution, (2) multiple programming languages support, including Python, Java, and Go, and (3) project-level runnable test cases to assess the quality of the generated code. Based on MRG-Bench, we conducted extensive experiments including large language models, long-context models, and RAG-related methods. These evaluation results demonstrate that current repository-level code generation techniques suffer from significant performance deficiencies. To further investigate why models fail, we designed novel experiments to annotate the underlying causes of generation errors. The results explicitly show that the majority of methods suffer from "difficulty in understanding user requirements," failing to comprehend their assigned tasks accurately. Moreover, the impact of different repository-level contexts on this issue exhibits significant disparities across different programming languages, suggesting that, in practice, specialized contextual information needs to be designed for different languages.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

KGym: A Platform and Dataset to Benchmark Large Language Models on Linux Kernel Crash Resolution

Large Language Models (LLMs) are consistently improving at increasingly realistic software engineering (SE) tasks. In real-world software stacks, significant SE effort is spent developing foundational system software like the Linux kernel. Unlike application-level software, a systems codebase like Linux is multilingual (low-level C/Assembly/Bash/Rust); gigantic (>20 million lines); critical (impacting billions of devices worldwide), and highly concurrent (involving complex multi-threading). To evaluate if ML models are useful while developing such large-scale systems-level software, we introduce kGym (a platform) and kBench (a dataset). The kGym platform provides a SE environment for large-scale experiments on the Linux kernel, including compiling and running kernels in parallel across several virtual machines, detecting operations and crashes, inspecting logs, and querying and patching the code base. We use kGym to facilitate evaluation on kBench, a crash resolution benchmark drawn from real-world Linux kernel bugs. An example bug in kBench contains crashing stack traces, a bug-reproducer file, a developer-written fix, and other associated data. To understand current performance, we conduct baseline experiments by prompting LLMs to resolve Linux kernel crashes. Our initial evaluations reveal that the best performing LLM achieves 0.72% and 5.38% in the unassisted and assisted (i.e., buggy files disclosed to the model) settings, respectively. These results highlight the need for further research to enhance model performance in SE tasks. Improving performance on kBench requires models to master new learning skills, including understanding the cause of crashes and repairing faults, writing memory-safe and hardware-aware code, and understanding concurrency. As a result, this work opens up multiple avenues of research at the intersection of machine learning and systems software.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 2, 2024

LDB: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step-by-step

Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 24, 2024

Empirical Research on Utilizing LLM-based Agents for Automated Bug Fixing via LangGraph

This paper presents a novel framework for automated code generation and debugging, designed to improve accuracy, efficiency, and scalability in software development. The proposed system integrates three core components LangGraph, GLM4 Flash, and ChromaDB within a four step iterative workflow to deliver robust performance and seamless functionality. LangGraph serves as a graph-based library for orchestrating tasks, providing precise control and execution while maintaining a unified state object for dynamic updates and consistency. It supports multi-agent, hierarchical, and sequential processes, making it highly adaptable to complex software engineering workflows. GLM4 Flash, a large language model, leverages its advanced capabilities in natural language understanding, contextual reasoning, and multilingual support to generate accurate code snippets based on user prompts. ChromaDB acts as a vector database for semantic search and contextual memory storage, enabling the identification of patterns and the generation of context-aware bug fixes based on historical data. The system operates through a structured four-step process: (1) Code Generation, which translates natural language descriptions into executable code; (2) Code Execution, which validates the code by identifying runtime errors and inconsistencies; (3) Code Repair, which iteratively refines buggy code using ChromaDB's memory capabilities and LangGraph's state tracking; and (4) Code Update, which ensures the code meets functional and performance requirements through iterative modifications.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 29, 2025

Sharing State Between Prompts and Programs

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced a new type of programming: natural language programming. By writing prompts that direct LLMs to perform natural language processing, code generation, reasoning, etc., users are writing code in natural language -- natural language code -- for the LLM to execute. An emerging area of research enables interoperability between natural language code and formal languages such as Python. We present a novel programming abstraction, shared program state, that removes the manual work required to enable interoperability between natural language code and program state. With shared program state, programmers can write natural code that directly writes program variables, computes with program objects, and implements control flow in the program. We present a schema for specifying natural function interfaces that extend programming systems to support natural code and leverage this schema to specify shared program state as a natural function interface. We implement shared program state in the Nightjar programming system. Nightjar enables programmers to write Python programs that contain natural code that shares the Python program state. We show that Nightjar programs achieve comparable or higher task accuracy than manually written implementations (+4-19%), while decreasing the lines of code by 39.6% on average. The tradeoff to using Nightjar is that it may incur runtime overhead (0.4-4.3x runtime of manual implementations).

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025 1

Class-Level Code Generation from Natural Language Using Iterative, Tool-Enhanced Reasoning over Repository

LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in code generation tasks, achieving promising results at the function or statement level across various benchmarks. However, the complexities associated with creating code artifacts like classes, particularly within the context of real-world software repositories, remain underexplored. Prior research treats class-level generation as an isolated task, neglecting the intricate dependencies & interactions that characterize real-world software environments. To address this gap, we introduce RepoClassBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs in generating complex, class-level code within real-world repositories. RepoClassBench includes "Natural Language to Class generation" tasks across Java, Python & C# from a selection of repositories. We ensure that each class in our dataset not only has cross-file dependencies within the repository but also includes corresponding test cases to verify its functionality. We find that current models struggle with the realistic challenges posed by our benchmark, primarily due to their limited exposure to relevant repository contexts. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Retrieve-Repotools-Reflect (RRR), a novel approach that equips LLMs with static analysis tools to iteratively navigate & reason about repository-level context in an agent-based framework. Our experiments demonstrate that RRR significantly outperforms existing baselines on RepoClassBench, showcasing its effectiveness across programming languages & under various settings. Our findings emphasize the critical need for code-generation benchmarks to incorporate repo-level dependencies to more accurately reflect the complexities of software development. Our work shows the benefits of leveraging specialized tools to enhance LLMs' understanding of repository context. We plan to make our dataset & evaluation harness public.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 21, 2024

You Don't Know Until You Click:Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 17, 2025

Assessing Small Language Models for Code Generation: An Empirical Study with Benchmarks

The recent advancements of Small Language Models (SLMs) have opened new possibilities for efficient code generation. SLMs offer lightweight and cost-effective alternatives to Large Language Models (LLMs), making them attractive for use in resource-constrained environments. However, empirical understanding of SLMs, particularly their capabilities, limitations, and performance trade-offs in code generation remains limited. This study presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of 20 open-source SLMs ranging from 0.4B to 10B parameters on five diverse code-related benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, Mercury, HumanEvalPack, and CodeXGLUE). The models are assessed along three dimensions: i) functional correctness of generated code, ii) computational efficiency and iii) performance across multiple programming languages. The findings of this study reveal that several compact SLMs achieve competitive results while maintaining a balance between performance and efficiency, making them viable for deployment in resource-constrained environments. However, achieving further improvements in accuracy requires switching to larger models. These models generally outperform their smaller counterparts, but they require much more computational power. We observe that for 10% performance improvements, models can require nearly a 4x increase in VRAM consumption, highlighting a trade-off between effectiveness and scalability. Besides, the multilingual performance analysis reveals that SLMs tend to perform better in languages such as Python, Java, and PHP, while exhibiting relatively weaker performance in Go, C++, and Ruby. However, statistical analysis suggests these differences are not significant, indicating a generalizability of SLMs across programming languages. Based on the findings, this work provides insights into the design and selection of SLMs for real-world code generation tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

Balancing Fairness and Performance in Multi-User Spark Workloads with Dynamic Scheduling (extended version)

Apache Spark is a widely adopted framework for large-scale data processing. However, in industrial analytics environments, Spark's built-in schedulers, such as FIFO and fair scheduling, struggle to maintain both user-level fairness and low mean response time, particularly in long-running shared applications. Existing solutions typically focus on job-level fairness which unintentionally favors users who submit more jobs. Although Spark offers a built-in fair scheduler, it lacks adaptability to dynamic user workloads and may degrade overall job performance. We present the User Weighted Fair Queuing (UWFQ) scheduler, designed to minimize job response times while ensuring equitable resource distribution across users and their respective jobs. UWFQ simulates a virtual fair queuing system and schedules jobs based on their estimated finish times under a bounded fairness model. To further address task skew and reduce priority inversions, which are common in Spark workloads, we introduce runtime partitioning, a method that dynamically refines task granularity based on expected runtime. We implement UWFQ within the Spark framework and evaluate its performance using multi-user synthetic workloads and Google cluster traces. We show that UWFQ reduces the average response time of small jobs by up to 74% compared to existing built-in Spark schedulers and to state-of-the-art fair scheduling algorithms.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Low-Resource Programming Languages for Code LLMs

Over the past few years, Large Language Models of Code (Code LLMs) have started to have a significant impact on programming practice. Code LLMs are also emerging as a building block for research in programming languages and software engineering. However, the quality of code produced by a Code LLM varies significantly by programming languages. Code LLMs produce impressive results on programming languages that are well represented in their training data (e.g., Java, Python, or JavaScript), but struggle with low-resource languages, like OCaml and Racket. This paper presents an effective approach for boosting the performance of Code LLMs on low-resource languages using semi-synthetic data. Our approach generates high-quality datasets for low-resource languages, which can then be used to fine-tune any pretrained Code LLM. Our approach, called MultiPL-T, translates training data from high-resource languages into training data for low-resource languages. We apply our approach to generate tens of thousands of new, validated training items for Racket, OCaml, and Lua from Python. Moreover, we use an open dataset (The Stack) and model (StarCoderBase), which allow us to decontaminate benchmarks and train models on this data without violating the model license. With MultiPL-T generated data, we present fine-tuned versions of StarCoderBase that achieve state-of-the-art performance for Racket, OCaml, and Lua on benchmark problems. For Lua, our fine-tuned model achieves the same performance as StarCoderBase as Python -- a very high-resource language -- on the MultiPL-E benchmarks. For Racket and OCaml, we double their performance on MultiPL-E, bringing their performance close to higher-resource languages such as Ruby and C#.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 18, 2023

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 9, 2021

Enhancing LLM Code Generation: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Agent Collaboration and Runtime Debugging for Improved Accuracy, Reliability, and Latency

The use of large language models (LLMs) for automated code generation has emerged as a significant focus within AI research. As these pretrained models continue to evolve, their ability to understand and generate complex code structures has opened new possibilities for automating intricate programming tasks for the sake of accurate code generation. Although contemporary foundational models demonstrate promoting results, researchers continue to explore optimal post-training strategies to enhance code quality. These include supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), debugging, and many others. In this paper, we combine two widely used approaches namely multi-agent collaboration and runtime execution information-based debugging, for improving code generation functionality, reliability, and practical applicability. We perform an empirical study in order to extend the evaluation of the individual strategies as well as the proposed composition of the activities of both strategies. Our study use 19 LLMs to examines the performance of individual and the proposed strategies, offering comprehensive insights into how different programming activities compositions and training paradigms influence code generation effectiveness. In particular, we implement a chained system that combines both strategies to assess their combined impact on functional accuracy, code reliability, and generation latency using two benchmark datasets commonly used for code generation. Our findings provide valuable insights for organizations seeking robust AI-driven coding solutions by guiding them in selecting models that can better adapt to complex post-training strategies, ultimately fostering the adoption of more effective and reliable code generation technologies.

  • 3 authors
·
May 4, 2025

LOOPer: A Learned Automatic Code Optimizer For Polyhedral Compilers

While polyhedral compilers have shown success in implementing advanced code transformations, they still face challenges in selecting the ones that lead to the most profitable speedups. This has motivated the use of machine learning based cost models to guide the search for polyhedral optimizations. State-of-the-art polyhedral compilers have demonstrated a viable proof-of-concept of such an approach. While promising, this approach still faces significant limitations. State-of-the-art polyhedral compilers that use a deep learning cost model only support a small subset of affine transformations, limiting their ability to explore complex code transformations. Furthermore, their applicability does not scale beyond simple programs, thus excluding many program classes from their scope, such as those with non-rectangular iteration domains or multiple loop nests. These limitations significantly impact the generality of such compilers and autoschedulers and put into question the whole approach. In this paper, we introduce LOOPer, the first polyhedral autoscheduler that uses a deep learning based cost model and covers a large space of affine transformations and programs. LOOPer allows the optimization of an extensive set of programs while being effective at applying complex sequences of polyhedral transformations. We implement and evaluate LOOPer and show that it achieves competitive speedups over the state-of-the-art. On the PolyBench benchmarks, LOOPer achieves a geometric mean speedup of 1.84x over Tiramisu and 1.42x over Pluto, two state-of-the-art polyhedral autoschedulers.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Skywork-SWE: Unveiling Data Scaling Laws for Software Engineering in LLMs

Software engineering (SWE) has recently emerged as a crucial testbed for next-generation LLM agents, demanding inherent capabilities in two critical dimensions: sustained iterative problem-solving (e.g., >50 interaction rounds) and long-context dependency resolution (e.g., >32k tokens). However, the data curation process in SWE remains notoriously time-consuming, as it heavily relies on manual annotation for code file filtering and the setup of dedicated runtime environments to execute and validate unit tests. Consequently, most existing datasets are limited to only a few thousand GitHub-sourced instances. To this end, we propose an incremental, automated data-curation pipeline that systematically scales both the volume and diversity of SWE datasets. Our dataset comprises 10,169 real-world Python task instances from 2,531 distinct GitHub repositories, each accompanied by a task specified in natural language and a dedicated runtime-environment image for automated unit-test validation. We have carefully curated over 8,000 successfully runtime-validated training trajectories from our proposed SWE dataset. When fine-tuning the Skywork-SWE model on these trajectories, we uncover a striking data scaling phenomenon: the trained model's performance for software engineering capabilities in LLMs continues to improve as the data size increases, showing no signs of saturation. Notably, our Skywork-SWE model achieves 38.0% pass@1 accuracy on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark without using verifiers or multiple rollouts, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-based LLMs built on the OpenHands agent framework. Furthermore, with the incorporation of test-time scaling techniques, the performance further improves to 47.0% accuracy, surpassing the previous SOTA results for sub-32B parameter models. We release the Skywork-SWE-32B model checkpoint to accelerate future research.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 23, 2025 3

ANPL: Towards Natural Programming with Interactive Decomposition

Though LLMs are capable of generating plausible programs, it's challenging to interact with the LLMs further to revise the program, especially if the user's specific requirements are different from the initial proposal. In this paper, we introduce ANPL, an interactive programming system that ensures users can always refine the generated code towards their specific programmatic intents via structured decompositions. Borrowing the paradigm of sketching from program synthesis, an ANPL program consists of a set of input-outputs that it must satisfy, a ``sketch'' -- control/data flow expressed in precise code (e.g. Python), and ``holes'' -- sub-modules to be implemented by the LLM specified with natural language. The user revises an ANPL program by either modifying the sketch, changing the language used to describe the holes, or providing additional input-outputs to a particular hole, turning it into a sub-ANPL program that can be solved recursively. This workflow allows the users to offload programming burdens to the LLM as much as possible while retaining the ability to pinpoint and resolve bugs locally, without exposing the rest of the program to the LLM. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. Additional evaluations on APPS, HumanEval, and real-world programming tasks have validated that the ANPL framework is applicable to multiple programming domains. We release the ANPL solutions to the ARC tasks as a dataset, providing insights into how humans decompose novel tasks programmatically. See our code at https://iprc-dip.github.io/ANPL/.

  • 11 authors
·
May 29, 2023

LoCoBench: A Benchmark for Long-Context Large Language Models in Complex Software Engineering

The emergence of long-context language models with context windows extending to millions of tokens has created new opportunities for sophisticated code understanding and software development evaluation. We propose LoCoBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate long-context LLMs in realistic, complex software development scenarios. Unlike existing code evaluation benchmarks that focus on single-function completion or short-context tasks, LoCoBench addresses the critical evaluation gap for long-context capabilities that require understanding entire codebases, reasoning across multiple files, and maintaining architectural consistency across large-scale software systems. Our benchmark provides 8,000 evaluation scenarios systematically generated across 10 programming languages, with context lengths spanning 10K to 1M tokens, a 100x variation that enables precise assessment of long-context performance degradation in realistic software development settings. LoCoBench introduces 8 task categories that capture essential long-context capabilities: architectural understanding, cross-file refactoring, multi-session development, bug investigation, feature implementation, code comprehension, integration testing, and security analysis. Through a 5-phase pipeline, we create diverse, high-quality scenarios that challenge LLMs to reason about complex codebases at unprecedented scale. We introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework with 17 metrics across 4 dimensions, including 8 new evaluation metrics, combined in a LoCoBench Score (LCBS). Our evaluation of state-of-the-art long-context models reveals substantial performance gaps, demonstrating that long-context understanding in complex software development represents a significant unsolved challenge that demands more attention. LoCoBench is released at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/LoCoBench.

  • 17 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025 2

CoderUJB: An Executable and Unified Java Benchmark for Practical Programming Scenarios

In the evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) tailored for software engineering, the need for benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world development scenarios is paramount. Current benchmarks are either too simplistic or fail to capture the multi-tasking nature of software development. To address this, we introduce CoderUJB, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across diverse Java programming tasks that are executable and reflective of actual development scenarios, acknowledging Java's prevalence in real-world software production. CoderUJB comprises 2,239 programming questions derived from 17 real open-source Java projects and spans five practical programming tasks. Our empirical study on this benchmark investigates the coding abilities of various open-source and closed-source LLMs, examining the effects of continued pre-training in specific programming languages code and instruction fine-tuning on their performance. The findings indicate that while LLMs exhibit strong potential, challenges remain, particularly in non-functional code generation (e.g., test generation and defect detection). Importantly, our results advise caution in the specific programming languages continued pre-training and instruction fine-tuning, as these techniques could hinder model performance on certain tasks, suggesting the need for more nuanced strategies. CoderUJB thus marks a significant step towards more realistic evaluations of programming capabilities in LLMs, and our study provides valuable insights for the future development of these models in software engineering.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

TRACED: Execution-aware Pre-training for Source Code

Most existing pre-trained language models for source code focus on learning the static code text, typically augmented with static code structures (abstract syntax tree, dependency graphs, etc.). However, program semantics will not be fully exposed before the real execution. Without an understanding of the program execution, statically pre-trained models fail to comprehensively capture the dynamic code properties, such as the branch coverage and the runtime variable values, and they are consequently less effective at code understanding tasks, such as retrieving semantic clones and detecting software vulnerabilities. To close the gap between the static nature of language models and the dynamic characteristics of programs, we introduce TRACED, an execution-aware pre-training strategy for source code. Specifically, we pre-train code language models with a combination of source code, executable inputs, and corresponding execution traces. Our goal is to teach code models the complicated execution logic during the pre-training, enabling the model to statically estimate the dynamic code properties without repeatedly executing code during task-specific fine-tuning. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we fine-tune and evaluate TRACED on three downstream tasks: static execution estimation, clone retrieval, and vulnerability detection. The empirical results show that TRACED relatively improves the statically pre-trained code models by 12.4% for complete execution path prediction and by 25.2% for runtime variable value predictions. TRACED also significantly outperforms statically pre-trained models in clone retrieval and vulnerability detection across four public benchmarks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2023

Root Cause Analysis In Microservice Using Neural Granger Causal Discovery

In recent years, microservices have gained widespread adoption in IT operations due to their scalability, maintenance, and flexibility. However, it becomes challenging for site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the root cause due to the complex relationships in microservices when facing system malfunctions. Previous research employed structured learning methods (e.g., PC-algorithm) to establish causal relationships and derive root causes from causal graphs. Nevertheless, they ignored the temporal order of time series data and failed to leverage the rich information inherent in the temporal relationships. For instance, in cases where there is a sudden spike in CPU utilization, it can lead to an increase in latency for other microservices. However, in this scenario, the anomaly in CPU utilization occurs before the latency increase, rather than simultaneously. As a result, the PC-algorithm fails to capture such characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose RUN, a novel approach for root cause analysis using neural Granger causal discovery with contrastive learning. RUN enhances the backbone encoder by integrating contextual information from time series, and leverages a time series forecasting model to conduct neural Granger causal discovery. In addition, RUN incorporates Pagerank with a personalization vector to efficiently recommend the top-k root causes. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic and real-world microservice-based datasets demonstrate that RUN noticeably outperforms the state-of-the-art root cause analysis methods. Moreover, we provide an analysis scenario for the sock-shop case to showcase the practicality and efficacy of RUN in microservice-based applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zmlin1998/RUN.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

ShortcutsBench: A Large-Scale Real-world Benchmark for API-based Agents

Recent advancements in integrating large language models (LLMs) with application programming interfaces (APIs) have gained significant interest in both academia and industry. These API-based agents, leveraging the strong autonomy and planning capabilities of LLMs, can efficiently solve problems requiring multi-step actions. However, their ability to handle multi-dimensional difficulty levels, diverse task types, and real-world demands through APIs remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce ShortcutsBench, a large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of API-based agents in solving tasks with varying levels of difficulty, diverse task types, and real-world demands. ShortcutsBench includes a wealth of real APIs from Apple Inc.'s operating systems, refined user queries from shortcuts, human-annotated high-quality action sequences from shortcut developers, and accurate parameter filling values about primitive parameter types, enum parameter types, outputs from previous actions, and parameters that need to request necessary information from the system or user. Our extensive evaluation of agents built with 5 leading open-source (size >= 57B) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g. Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-3.5) reveals significant limitations in handling complex queries related to API selection, parameter filling, and requesting necessary information from systems and users. These findings highlight the challenges that API-based agents face in effectively fulfilling real and complex user queries. All datasets, code, and experimental results will be available at https://github.com/eachsheep/shortcutsbench.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 28, 2024

EnvBench: A Benchmark for Automated Environment Setup

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 18, 2025

CODESIM: Multi-Agent Code Generation and Problem Solving through Simulation-Driven Planning and Debugging

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in code generation and problem solving. Current approaches employ external tool-based iterative debuggers that use compiler or other tool-based runtime feedback to refine coarse programs generated by various methods. However, the effectiveness of these approaches heavily relies on the quality of the initial code generation, which remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce CodeSim, a novel multi-agent code generation framework that comprehensively addresses the stages of program synthesis-planning, coding, and debugging-through a human-like perception approach. As human verifies their understanding of any algorithms through visual simulation, CodeSim uniquely features a method of plan verification and internal debugging through the step-by-step simulation of input/output. Extensive experiments across seven challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks demonstrate CodeSim's remarkable code generation capabilities. Our framework achieves new state-of-the-art (pass@1) results-(HumanEval 95.1%, MBPP 90.7%, APPS 22%, and CodeContests 29.1%). Furthermore, our method shows potential for even greater enhancement when cascaded with external debuggers. To facilitate further research and development in this area, we have open-sourced our framework in this link (https://kagnlp.github.io/codesim.github.io/).

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 8, 2025 3

MMFactory: A Universal Solution Search Engine for Vision-Language Tasks

With advances in foundational and vision-language models, and effective fine-tuning techniques, a large number of both general and special-purpose models have been developed for a variety of visual tasks. Despite the flexibility and accessibility of these models, no single model is able to handle all tasks and/or applications that may be envisioned by potential users. Recent approaches, such as visual programming and multimodal LLMs with integrated tools aim to tackle complex visual tasks, by way of program synthesis. However, such approaches overlook user constraints (e.g., performance / computational needs), produce test-time sample-specific solutions that are difficult to deploy, and, sometimes, require low-level instructions that maybe beyond the abilities of a naive user. To address these limitations, we introduce MMFactory, a universal framework that includes model and metrics routing components, acting like a solution search engine across various available models. Based on a task description and few sample input-output pairs and (optionally) resource and/or performance constraints, MMFactory can suggest a diverse pool of programmatic solutions by instantiating and combining visio-lingual tools from its model repository. In addition to synthesizing these solutions, MMFactory also proposes metrics and benchmarks performance / resource characteristics, allowing users to pick a solution that meets their unique design constraints. From the technical perspective, we also introduced a committee-based solution proposer that leverages multi-agent LLM conversation to generate executable, diverse, universal, and robust solutions for the user. Experimental results show that MMFactory outperforms existing methods by delivering state-of-the-art solutions tailored to user problem specifications. Project page is available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/mmfactory_demo.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024 2

How Well Do LLMs Generate Code for Different Application Domains? Benchmark and Evaluation

Recently, an increasing number of AI-driven programming assistants powered by code LLMs have been integrated into various real-world software development environments, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily focus on general-purpose scenarios, leaving the code generation performance of LLMs for specific application domains largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, MultiCodeBench, to fill this gap. MultiCodeBench comprises 2,400 programming tasks, covering 12 popular software development domains and 15 programming languages. Specifically, we perform in-depth research to identify these 12 application domains. Given that each domain may involve multiple technical frameworks, and that different frameworks present distinct challenges in the coding process, we categorize the commonly used frameworks and platforms within each domain. We then sample programming problems from GitHub repositories related to these subdomains. To ensure the quality of the tasks and mitigate data leakage issues, we invite annotators to rewrite the docstrings for each task in MultiCodeBench. Additionally, we build a static analysis-based dependency parsing tool to extract the dependencies in the ground truth for each task, enabling deeper performance analysis. Through extensive experiments on MultiCodeBench with eleven representative mainstream LLMs, we reveal the code generation performance of the LLMs across different application domains, providing practical insights for developers in downstream fields when selecting LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons behind the models' failures in completing software application development tasks, offering guidance for model developers to enhance domain-specific code generation capabilities.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024

Can LLMs Replace Humans During Code Chunking?

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential tools in computer science, especially for tasks involving code understanding and generation. However, existing work does not address many of the unique challenges presented by code written for government applications. In particular, government enterprise software is often written in legacy languages like MUMPS or assembly language code (ALC) and the overall token lengths of these systems exceed the context window size for current commercially available LLMs. Additionally, LLMs are primarily trained on modern software languages and have undergone limited testing with legacy languages, making their ability to understand legacy languages unknown and, hence, an area for empirical study. This paper examines the application of LLMs in the modernization of legacy government code written in ALC and MUMPS, addressing the challenges of input limitations. We investigate various code-chunking methods to optimize the generation of summary module comments for legacy code files, evaluating the impact of code-chunking methods on the quality of documentation produced by different LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3 Sonnet, Mixtral, and Llama 3. Our results indicate that LLMs can select partition points closely aligned with human expert partitioning. We also find that chunking approaches have significant impact on downstream tasks such as documentation generation. LLM-created partitions produce comments that are up to 20% more factual and up to 10% more useful than when humans create partitions. Therefore, we conclude that LLMs can be used as suitable replacements for human partitioning of large codebases during LLM-aided modernization.

  • 17 authors
·
Jun 24, 2025

Closing the Performance Gap with Modern C++

On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as hardware architectures are becoming more and more diverse. Today's heterogeneous systems often include two or more completely distinct and incompatible hardware execution models, such as GPGPU's, SIMD vector units, and general purpose cores which conventionally have to be programmed using separate tool chains representing non-overlapping programming models. The recent revival of interest in the industry and the wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications in the arena of concurrency and parallelism. This recently includes an increasing amount of discussion around the need for a uniform, higher-level abstraction and programming model for parallelism in the C++ standard targeting heterogeneous and distributed computing. Such an abstraction should perfectly blend with existing, already standardized language and library features, but should also be generic enough to support future hardware developments. In this paper, we present the results from developing such a higher-level programming abstraction for parallelism in C++ which aims at enabling code and performance portability over a wide range of architectures and for various types of parallelism. We present and compare performance data obtained from running the well-known STREAM benchmark ported to our higher level C++ abstraction with the corresponding results from running it natively. We show that our abstractions enable performance at least as good as the comparable base-line benchmarks while providing a uniform programming API on all compared target architectures.

  • 5 authors
·
May 30, 2022

XMainframe: A Large Language Model for Mainframe Modernization

Mainframe operating systems, despite their inception in the 1940s, continue to support critical sectors like finance and government. However, these systems are often viewed as outdated, requiring extensive maintenance and modernization. Addressing this challenge necessitates innovative tools that can understand and interact with legacy codebases. To this end, we introduce XMainframe, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) specifically designed with knowledge of mainframe legacy systems and COBOL codebases. Our solution involves the creation of an extensive data collection pipeline to produce high-quality training datasets, enhancing XMainframe's performance in this specialized domain. Additionally, we present MainframeBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing mainframe knowledge, including multiple-choice questions, question answering, and COBOL code summarization. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that XMainframe consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art LLMs across these tasks. Specifically, XMainframe achieves 30% higher accuracy than DeepSeek-Coder on multiple-choice questions, doubles the BLEU score of Mixtral-Instruct 8x7B on question answering, and scores six times higher than GPT-3.5 on COBOL summarization. Our work highlights the potential of XMainframe to drive significant advancements in managing and modernizing legacy systems, thereby enhancing productivity and saving time for software developers.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 5, 2024

EpiCoder: Encompassing Diversity and Complexity in Code Generation

Effective instruction tuning is indispensable for optimizing code LLMs, aligning model behavior with user expectations and enhancing model performance in real-world applications. However, most existing methods focus on code snippets, which are limited to specific functionalities and rigid structures, restricting the complexity and diversity of the synthesized data. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel feature tree-based synthesis framework inspired by Abstract Syntax Trees (AST). Unlike AST, which captures syntactic structure of code, our framework models semantic relationships between code elements, enabling the generation of more nuanced and diverse data. The feature tree is constructed from raw data and refined iteratively to increase the quantity and diversity of the extracted features. This process enables the identification of more complex patterns and relationships within the code. By sampling subtrees with controlled depth and breadth, our framework allows precise adjustments to the complexity of the generated code, supporting a wide range of tasks from simple function-level operations to intricate multi-file scenarios. We fine-tuned widely-used base models to create the EpiCoder series, achieving state-of-the-art performance at both the function and file levels across multiple benchmarks. Notably, empirical evidence indicates that our approach shows significant potential in synthesizing highly complex repository-level code data. Further analysis elucidates the merits of this approach by rigorously assessing data complexity and diversity through software engineering principles and LLM-as-a-judge method.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 8, 2025 2

CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsets

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters

Code large language models (Code LLMs) are powerful but costly to train, with scaling laws predicting performance from model size, data, and compute. However, different programming languages (PLs) have varying impacts during pre-training that significantly affect base model performance, leading to inaccurate performance prediction. Besides, existing works focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. Therefore, it is first necessary to investigate the scaling laws of different PLs, and then consider their mutual influences to arrive at the final multilingual scaling law. In this paper, we present the first systematic exploration of scaling laws for multilingual code pre-training, conducting over 1000+ experiments (Equivalent to 336,000+ H800 hours) across multiple PLs, model sizes (0.2B to 14B parameters), and dataset sizes (1T tokens). We establish comprehensive scaling laws for code LLMs across multiple PLs, revealing that interpreted languages (e.g., Python) benefit more from increased model size and data than compiled languages (e.g., Rust). The study demonstrates that multilingual pre-training provides synergistic benefits, particularly between syntactically similar PLs. Further, the pre-training strategy of the parallel pairing (concatenating code snippets with their translations) significantly enhances cross-lingual abilities with favorable scaling properties. Finally, a proportion-dependent multilingual scaling law is proposed to optimally allocate training tokens by prioritizing high-utility PLs (e.g., Python), balancing high-synergy pairs (e.g., JavaScript-TypeScript), and reducing allocation to fast-saturating languages (Rust), achieving superior average performance across all PLs compared to uniform distribution under the same compute budget.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025 2

Reasoning Runtime Behavior of a Program with LLM: How Far Are We?

Large language models for code (i.e., code LLMs) have shown strong code understanding and generation capabilities. To evaluate the capabilities of code LLMs in various aspects, many benchmarks have been proposed (e.g., HumanEval and ClassEval). Code reasoning is one of the most essential abilities of code LLMs, but existing benchmarks for code reasoning are not sufficient. Typically, they focus on predicting the input and output of a program, ignoring the evaluation of the intermediate behavior during program execution, as well as the logical consistency (e.g., the model should not give the correct output if the prediction of execution path is wrong) when performing the reasoning. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a framework, namely REval, for evaluating code reasoning abilities and consistency of code LLMs with program execution. We utilize existing code benchmarks and adapt them to new benchmarks within our framework. A large-scale empirical study is conducted and most LLMs show unsatisfactory performance on both Runtime Behavior Reasoning (i.e., an average accuracy of 44.4%) and Incremental Consistency Evaluation (i.e., an average IC score of 10.3). Evaluation results of current code LLMs reflect the urgent need for the community to strengthen the code reasoning capability of code LLMs. Our code, data, and \newname leaderboard are available at https://r-eval.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

ComPile: A Large IR Dataset from Production Sources

Code is increasingly becoming a core data modality of modern machine learning research impacting not only the way we write code with conversational agents like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, or Anthropic's Claude, the way we translate code from one language into another, but also the compiler infrastructure underlying the language. While modeling approaches may vary and representations differ, the targeted tasks often remain the same within the individual classes of models. Relying solely on the ability of modern models to extract information from unstructured code does not take advantage of 70 years of programming language and compiler development by not utilizing the structure inherent to programs in the data collection. This detracts from the performance of models working over a tokenized representation of input code and precludes the use of these models in the compiler itself. To work towards the first intermediate representation (IR) based models, we fully utilize the LLVM compiler infrastructure, shared by a number of languages, to generate a 182B token dataset of LLVM IR. We generated this dataset from programming languages built on the shared LLVM infrastructure, including Rust, Swift, Julia, and C/C++, by hooking into LLVM code generation either through the language's package manager or the compiler directly to extract the dataset of intermediate representations from production grade programs. Statistical analysis proves the utility of our dataset not only for large language model training, but also for the introspection into the code generation process itself with the dataset showing great promise for machine-learned compiler components.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 27, 2023

CUDA-LLM: LLMs Can Write Efficient CUDA Kernels

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose code generation. However, generating the code which is deeply hardware-specific, architecture-aware, and performance-critical, especially for massively parallel GPUs, remains a complex challenge. In this work, we explore the use of LLMs for the automated generation and optimization of CUDA programs, with the goal of producing high-performance GPU kernels that fully exploit the underlying hardware. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Feature Search and Reinforcement (FSR). FSR jointly optimizes compilation and functional correctness, as well as the runtime performance, which are validated through extensive and diverse test cases, and measured by actual kernel execution latency on the target GPU, respectively. This approach enables LLMs not only to generate syntactically and semantically correct CUDA code but also to iteratively refine it for efficiency, tailored to the characteristics of the GPU architecture. We evaluate FSR on representative CUDA kernels, covering AI workloads and computational intensive algorithms. Our results show that LLMs augmented with FSR consistently guarantee correctness rates. Meanwhile, the automatically generated kernels can outperform general human-written code by a factor of up to 179times in execution speeds. These findings highlight the potential of combining LLMs with performance reinforcement to automate GPU programming for hardware-specific, architecture-sensitive, and performance-critical applications.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025

Enhancing Code Generation for Low-Resource Languages: No Silver Bullet

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automated code generation. LLMs rely on large and diverse datasets to learn syntax, semantics, and usage patterns of programming languages. For low-resource languages (i.e., niche programming languages characterized by the scarcity of training data), the limited availability of such data hampers the models' ability to generalize effectively, resulting in poorer code generation performance as compared to high-resource languages. For this reason, there is a quest for techniques able to close this performance gap. We present an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of several approaches for boosting LLMs' performance on low-resource languages, namely: (i) a classic fine-tuning, which is however capped in size by the scarcity of training data; (ii) three variants of in-context learning, with prompts crafted to provide the LLM with additional information about the low-resource language (e.g., few-shot examples showcasing features of the targeted language); and (iii) a pre-training objective teaching the model how to translate between high- and low-resource languages. The context of our study are two low-resource languages (R and Racket) and six LLMs having different architectures and sizes. Our findings reveal that a fine-tuning is usually the best choice for smaller LLMs, possibly due to the fact that even a small dataset is sufficient to train their limited number of parameters. With the increase in size of the models, in-context learning becomes more and more effective, representing a safe and cheap bet (i.e., it always helps, but with different magnitudes). Differently, very large LLMs may deteriorate their performance on low-resource languages when fine-tuning is performed, possibly due to the lack of enough data needed to effectively update their weights.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 31, 2025 4

Leveraging Graph-RAG and Prompt Engineering to Enhance LLM-Based Automated Requirement Traceability and Compliance Checks

Ensuring that Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) align with higher-level organizational or national requirements is vital, particularly in regulated environments such as finance and aerospace. In these domains, maintaining consistency, adhering to regulatory frameworks, minimizing errors, and meeting critical expectations are essential for the reliable functioning of systems. The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights their immense potential, yet there remains considerable scope for improvement in retrieving relevant information and enhancing reasoning capabilities. This study demonstrates that integrating a robust Graph-RAG framework with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as Chain of Thought and Tree of Thought, can significantly enhance performance. Compared to baseline RAG methods and simple prompting strategies, this approach delivers more accurate and context-aware results. While this method demonstrates significant improvements in performance, it comes with challenges. It is both costly and more complex to implement across diverse contexts, requiring careful adaptation to specific scenarios. Additionally, its effectiveness heavily relies on having complete and accurate input data, which may not always be readily available, posing further limitations to its scalability and practicality.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

Training Language Models on Synthetic Edit Sequences Improves Code Synthesis

Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024 3

OMPGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer Model for OpenMP

Large language models (LLMs), as epitomized by models like ChatGPT, have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). Along with this trend, code-based large language models such as StarCoder, WizardCoder, and CodeLlama have emerged, trained extensively on vast repositories of code data. Yet, inherent in their design, these models primarily focus on generative tasks like code generation, code completion, and comment generation, and general support for multiple programming languages. While the generic abilities of code LLMs are useful for many programmers, the area of high-performance computing (HPC) has a narrower set of requirements that make a smaller and more domain-specific LM a smarter choice. This paper introduces OMPGPT, a novel model meticulously designed to harness the inherent strengths of language models for OpenMP pragma generation. Furthermore, we adopt and adapt prompt engineering techniques from the NLP domain to create chain-of-OMP, an innovative strategy designed to enhance OMPGPT's effectiveness. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that OMPGPT outperforms existing large language models specialized in OpenMP tasks and maintains a notably smaller size, aligning it more closely with the typical hardware constraints of HPC environments. We consider our contribution as a pivotal bridge, connecting the advantage of language models with the specific demands of HPC tasks. The success of OMPGPT lays a solid foundation, suggesting its potential applicability and adaptability to a wider range of HPC tasks, thereby opening new avenues in the field of computational efficiency and effectiveness.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

Can ChatGPT replace StackOverflow? A Study on Robustness and Reliability of Large Language Model Code Generation

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 20, 2023

APEX: An Extensible and Dynamism-Aware Simulator for Automated Parallel Execution in LLM Serving

Efficiently serving Large Language Models (LLMs) requires selecting an optimal parallel execution plan, balancing computation, memory, and communication overhead. However, determining the best strategy is challenging due to varying parallelism techniques (data, pipeline, tensor) and workload characteristics (e.g., compute-intensive tasks with long prompts vs. memory-intensive tasks with long generation). We propose APEX, an LLM serving system simulator that efficiently identifies optimal parallel execution plans by considering key factors of LLM serving systems, such as memory usage, batching behavior, etc. APEX performs dynamism-aware simulation to model iteration-level batching, and leverages LLMs' repetitive structure to reduce design space, scaling efficiently to trillion-scale models. APEX abstracts the key components of LLM serving systems, including the model, batching module, quantization formats, and device clusters, enabling the simulator to be general and extensible. Simulating on a CPU, APEX evaluates execution plans for various device clusters, covering diverse LLMs and workloads. APEX finds plans up to 3.37x faster than heuristics, and also plans that reduce energy consumption by up to 45% compared to latency-optimal plans. APEX performs comprehensive evaluations, reporting key system metrics like time per output token and time to first token, which can help service providers meet SLOs. APEX identifies an optimal plan within 15 minutes on a CPU, making it 71x faster and 1234x more cost-effective than cloud-based GPU deployment. APEX can be accessed at https://github.com/microsoft/apex_plus

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Generating a Low-code Complete Workflow via Task Decomposition and RAG

AI technologies are moving rapidly from research to production. With the popularity of Foundation Models (FMs) that generate text, images, and video, AI-based systems are increasing their complexity. Compared to traditional AI-based software, systems employing FMs, or GenAI-based systems, are more difficult to design due to their scale and versatility. This makes it necessary to document best practices, known as design patterns in software engineering, that can be used across GenAI applications. Our first contribution is to formalize two techniques, Task Decomposition and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as design patterns for GenAI-based systems. We discuss their trade-offs in terms of software quality attributes and comment on alternative approaches. We recommend to AI practitioners to consider these techniques not only from a scientific perspective but also from the standpoint of desired engineering properties such as flexibility, maintainability, safety, and security. As a second contribution, we describe our industry experience applying Task Decomposition and RAG to build a complex real-world GenAI application for enterprise users: Workflow Generation. The task of generating workflows entails generating a specific plan using data from the system environment, taking as input a user requirement. As these two patterns affect the entire AI development cycle, we explain how they impacted the dataset creation, model training, model evaluation, and deployment phases.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
Nov 29, 2024 2

CORE: Benchmarking LLMs Code Reasoning Capabilities through Static Analysis Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted across diverse software engineering domains, such as code generation, program repair, and vulnerability detection. These applications require understanding beyond surface-level code patterns: value propagation, control flow, and interdependence between program elements. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate end-to-end outcomes, such as whether code is correctly repaired or generated, leaving the models ability for program semantic reasoning underexplored. This work presents CoRe, a high-quality, human-verified benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on fundamental static analysis tasks. CoRe includes 12,553 task instances spanning data dependency, control dependency, and information flow across programs written in C/C++, Java, and Python. To ensure semantic diversity and reasoning complexity, we propose a semantics-aware diverse sampling strategy that selects targets and task instances based on structural coverage and dependency depth. We evaluate 10 mainstream LLMs and show that, while they perform well at identifying dependencies, models still struggle with tasks that require deeper semantic understanding and multi-step reasoning. We further conduct qualitative analyses to uncover key challenges, such as complex control structures and backward dependency patterns, offering insights into improving LLMs code reasoning capabilities.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

Learning Type Inference for Enhanced Dataflow Analysis

Statically analyzing dynamically-typed code is a challenging endeavor, as even seemingly trivial tasks such as determining the targets of procedure calls are non-trivial without knowing the types of objects at compile time. Addressing this challenge, gradual typing is increasingly added to dynamically-typed languages, a prominent example being TypeScript that introduces static typing to JavaScript. Gradual typing improves the developer's ability to verify program behavior, contributing to robust, secure and debuggable programs. In practice, however, users only sparsely annotate types directly. At the same time, conventional type inference faces performance-related challenges as program size grows. Statistical techniques based on machine learning offer faster inference, but although recent approaches demonstrate overall improved accuracy, they still perform significantly worse on user-defined types than on the most common built-in types. Limiting their real-world usefulness even more, they rarely integrate with user-facing applications. We propose CodeTIDAL5, a Transformer-based model trained to reliably predict type annotations. For effective result retrieval and re-integration, we extract usage slices from a program's code property graph. Comparing our approach against recent neural type inference systems, our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 7.85% on the ManyTypes4TypeScript benchmark, achieving 71.27% accuracy overall. Furthermore, we present JoernTI, an integration of our approach into Joern, an open source static analysis tool, and demonstrate that the analysis benefits from the additional type information. As our model allows for fast inference times even on commodity CPUs, making our system available through Joern leads to high accessibility and facilitates security research.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 1, 2023 1

Energy-Aware Code Generation with LLMs: Benchmarking Small vs. Large Language Models for Sustainable AI Programming

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for code generation. However, commercial models like ChatGPT require significant computing power, which leads to high energy use and carbon emissions. This has raised concerns about their environmental impact. In this study, we evaluate open-source Small Language Models (SLMs) trained explicitly for code generation and compare their performance and energy efficiency against large LLMs and efficient human-written Python code. The goal is to investigate whether SLMs can match the performance of LLMs on certain types of programming problems while producing more energy-efficient code. We evaluate 150 coding problems from LeetCode, evenly distributed across three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. Our comparison includes three small open-source models, StableCode-3B, StarCoderBase-3B, and Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct, and two large commercial models, GPT-4.0 and DeepSeek-Reasoner. The generated code is evaluated using four key metrics: run-time, memory usage, energy consumption, and correctness. We use human-written solutions as a baseline to assess the quality and efficiency of the model-generated code. Results indicate that LLMs achieve the highest correctness across all difficulty levels, but SLMs are often more energy-efficient when their outputs are correct. In over 52% of the evaluated problems, SLMs consumed the same or less energy than LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025

CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on coding related tasks, particularly on assisting humans in programming and facilitating programming automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of LLMs suffer from severe limitations. First, most benchmarks are deficient as they focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks, whereas the real-world software development scenarios show dire need to implement systems with multilingual programming environments to satisfy diverse requirements. Practical programming practices also strongly expect multi-task settings for testing coding capabilities of LLMs comprehensively and robustly. Second, most benchmarks also fail to consider the actual executability and the consistency of execution results of the generated code. To bridge these gaps between existing benchmarks and expectations from practical applications, we introduce CodeScope, an execution-based, multilingual, multi-task, multi-dimensional evaluation benchmark for comprehensively gauging LLM capabilities on coding tasks. CodeScope covers 43 programming languages and 8 coding tasks. It evaluates the coding performance of LLMs from three dimensions (perspectives): difficulty, efficiency, and length. To facilitate execution-based evaluations of code generation, we develop MultiCodeEngine, an automated code execution engine that supports 14 programming languages. Finally, we systematically evaluate and analyze 8 mainstream LLMs on CodeScope tasks and demonstrate the superior breadth and challenges of CodeScope for evaluating LLMs on code understanding and generation tasks compared to other benchmarks. The CodeScope benchmark and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeScope.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

From Medprompt to o1: Exploration of Run-Time Strategies for Medical Challenge Problems and Beyond

Run-time steering strategies like Medprompt are valuable for guiding large language models (LLMs) to top performance on challenging tasks. Medprompt demonstrates that a general LLM can be focused to deliver state-of-the-art performance on specialized domains like medicine by using a prompt to elicit a run-time strategy involving chain of thought reasoning and ensembling. OpenAI's o1-preview model represents a new paradigm, where a model is designed to do run-time reasoning before generating final responses. We seek to understand the behavior of o1-preview on a diverse set of medical challenge problem benchmarks. Following on the Medprompt study with GPT-4, we systematically evaluate the o1-preview model across various medical benchmarks. Notably, even without prompting techniques, o1-preview largely outperforms the GPT-4 series with Medprompt. We further systematically study the efficacy of classic prompt engineering strategies, as represented by Medprompt, within the new paradigm of reasoning models. We found that few-shot prompting hinders o1's performance, suggesting that in-context learning may no longer be an effective steering approach for reasoning-native models. While ensembling remains viable, it is resource-intensive and requires careful cost-performance optimization. Our cost and accuracy analysis across run-time strategies reveals a Pareto frontier, with GPT-4o representing a more affordable option and o1-preview achieving state-of-the-art performance at higher cost. Although o1-preview offers top performance, GPT-4o with steering strategies like Medprompt retains value in specific contexts. Moreover, we note that the o1-preview model has reached near-saturation on many existing medical benchmarks, underscoring the need for new, challenging benchmarks. We close with reflections on general directions for inference-time computation with LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 1

Serverless Cold Starts and Where to Find Them

This paper releases and analyzes a month-long trace of 85 billion user requests and 11.9 million cold starts from Huawei's serverless cloud platform. Our analysis spans workloads from five data centers. We focus on cold starts and provide a comprehensive examination of the underlying factors influencing the number and duration of cold starts. These factors include trigger types, request synchronicity, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. We investigate components of cold starts, including pod allocation time, code and dependency deployment time, and scheduling delays, and examine their relationships with runtime languages, trigger types, and resource allocation. We introduce pod utility ratio to measure the pod's useful lifetime relative to its cold start time, giving a more complete picture of cold starts, and see that some pods with long cold start times have longer useful lifetimes. Our findings reveal the complexity and multifaceted origins of the number, duration, and characteristics of cold starts, driven by differences in trigger types, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. For example, cold starts in Region 1 take up to 7 seconds, dominated by dependency deployment time and scheduling. In Region 2, cold starts take up to 3 seconds and are dominated by pod allocation time. Based on this, we identify opportunities to reduce the number and duration of cold starts using strategies for multi-region scheduling. Finally, we suggest directions for future research to address these challenges and enhance the performance of serverless cloud platforms. Our datasets and code are available here https://github.com/sir-lab/data-release

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024