CompCodeVet: A Compiler-guided Validation and Enhancement Approach for Code Dataset

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prominent in academia and industry due to their remarkable performance in diverse applications. As these models evolve with increasing parameters, they excel in tasks like sentiment analysis and machine translation. However, even models with billions of parameters face challenges in tasks demanding multi-step reasoning. Code generation and comprehension, especially in C and C++, emerge as significant challenges. While LLMs trained on code datasets demonstrate competence in many tasks, they struggle with rectifying non-compilable C and C++ code. Our investigation attributes this subpar performance to two primary factors: the quality of the training dataset and the inherent complexity of the problem which demands intricate reasoning. Existing "Chain of Thought" (CoT) prompting techniques aim to enhance multi-step reasoning. This approach, however, retains the limitations associated with the latent drawbacks of LLMs. In this work, we propose CompCodeVet, a compiler-guided CoT approach to produce compilable code from non-compilable ones. Diverging from the conventional approach of utilizing larger LLMs, we employ compilers as a teacher to establish a more robust zero-shot thought process. The evaluation of CompCodeVet on two open-source code datasets shows that CompCodeVet has the ability to improve the training dataset quality for LLMs.