Lin Tan


2025

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Can Language Models Replace Programmers for Coding? REPOCOD Says ‘Not Yet’
Shanchao Liang | Nan Jiang | Yiran Hu | Lin Tan
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, a number of repository-level code generation benchmarks–such as CoderEval, DevEval, RepoEval, RepoBench, and LongCode-Arena–have emerged to evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) beyond standalone benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP. Thus, a natural question is, would LLMs have similar performance in real world coding tasks as their performance in these benchmarks? Unfortunately, one cannot answer this question, since these benchmarks consist of short completions, synthetic examples, or focus on limited scale repositories, failing to represent real-world coding tasks.To address these challenges, we create RepoCod, a Python code-generation benchmark containing complex tasks with realistic dependencies in real-world large projects and appropriate metrics for evaluating source code. It includes 980 whole-function generation tasks from 11 popular projects, 50.8% of which require repository-level context. RepoCod includes 314 developer-written test cases per instance for better evaluation. We evaluate ten LLMs on RepoCod and find that none achieves more than 30% pass@1 on RepoCod, indicating the necessity of building stronger LLMs that can help developers in real-world software development. In addition, we found that retrieval-augmented generation achieves better results than using target function dependencies as context.

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WAFFLE: Fine-tuning Multi-Modal Model for Automated Front-End Development
Shanchao Liang | Nan Jiang | Shangshu Qian | Lin Tan
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Web development involves turning UI designs into functional webpages, which can be difficult for both beginners and experienced developers due to the complexity of HTML’s hierarchical structures and styles. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating source code, two major challenges persist in UI-to-HTML code generation: (1) effectively representing HTML’s hierarchical structure for LLMs, and (2) bridging the gap between the visual nature of UI designs and the text-based format of HTML code. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Waffle, a new fine-tuning strategy that uses a structure-aware attention mechanism to improve LLMs’ understanding of HTML’s structure and a contrastive fine-tuning approach to align LLMs’ understanding of UI images and HTML code. Models fine-tuned with Waffle show up to 9.00 pp (percentage point) higher HTML match, 0.0982 higher CW-SSIM, 32.99 higher CLIP, and 27.12 pp higher LLEM on our new benchmark WebSight-Test and an existing benchmark Design2Code, outperforming current fine-tuning methods.