INTERVENOR: Prompting the Coding Ability of Large Language Models with the Interactive Chain of Repair

Hanbin Wang, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Zhiyuan Liu, Ge Yu


Abstract
This paper introduces INTERVENOR (INTERactiVE chaiN Of Repair), a system designed to emulate the interactive code repair processes observed in humans, encompassing both code diagnosis and code repair. INTERVENOR prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) to play distinct roles during the code repair process, functioning as both a Code Learner and a Code Teacher. Specifically, the Code Learner is tasked with adhering to instructions to generate or repair code, while the Code Teacher is responsible for crafting a Chain-of-Repair (CoR) to serve as guidance for the Code Learner. During generating the CoR, the Code Teacher needs to check the generated codes from Code Learner and reassess how to address code bugs based on error feedback received from compilers. Experimental results demonstrate that INTERVENOR surpasses baseline models, exhibiting improvements of approximately 18% and 4.3% over GPT-3.5 in code generation and code translation tasks, respectively. Our further analyses show that CoR is effective to illuminate the reasons behind bugs and outline solution plans in natural language. With the feedback of code compilers, INTERVENOR can accurately identify syntax errors and assertion errors and provide precise instructions to repair codes. All data and codes are available at [https://github.com/NEUIR/INTERVENOR](https://github.com/NEUIR/INTERVENOR).
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.124
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2081–2107
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.124
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanbin Wang, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Zhiyuan Liu, and Ge Yu. 2024. INTERVENOR: Prompting the Coding Ability of Large Language Models with the Interactive Chain of Repair. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 2081–2107, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
INTERVENOR: Prompting the Coding Ability of Large Language Models with the Interactive Chain of Repair (Wang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.124.pdf