In this paper, we propose CodeSCM, a Structural Causal Model (SCM) for analyzing multi-modal code generation using large language models (LLMs). By applying interventions to CodeSCM, we measure the causal effects of different prompt modalities, such as natural language, code, and input-output examples, on the model. CodeSCM introduces latent mediator variables to separate the code and natural language semantics of a multi-modal code generation prompt. Using the principles of Causal Mediation Analysis on these mediators we quantify direct effects representing the model’s spurious leanings. We find that, in addition to natural language instructions, input-output examples significantly influence code generation.

Biomedical queries have become increasingly prevalent in web searches, reflecting the growing interest in accessing biomedical literature. Despite recent research on large-language models (LLMs) motivated by endeavors to attain generalized intelligence, their efficacy in replacing task and domain-specific natural language understanding approaches remains questionable. In this paper, we address this question by conducting a comprehensive empirical evaluation of intent detection and named entity recognition (NER) tasks from biomedical text. We show that Supervised Fine Tuned approaches are still relevant and more effective than general-purpose LLMs. Biomedical transformer models such as PubMedBERT can surpass ChatGPT on NER task with only 5 supervised examples.