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Lingming Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Lingming Zhang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

WhiteFox: White-Box Compiler Fuzzing Empowered by Large Language Models

Compiler correctness is crucial, as miscompilation can falsify program behaviors, leading to serious consequences. Fuzzing has been studied to uncover compiler defects. However, compiler fuzzing remains challenging: Existing arts focus on black- and grey-box fuzzing, which generates tests without sufficient understanding of internal compiler behaviors. Meanwhile, traditional white-box techniques, like symbolic execution, are computationally inapplicable to the giant codebase of compilers. Recent advances demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation/understanding tasks. Nonetheless, guiding LLMs with compiler source-code information remains a missing piece of research in compiler testing. To this end, we propose WhiteFox, the first white-box compiler fuzzer using LLMs with source-code information to test compiler optimization, with a spotlight on detecting deep logic bugs in the deep learning (DL) compilers. WhiteFox adopts a multi-agent framework: an LLM-based analysis agent examines the low-level optimization source code and produces requirements on the high-level test programs that can trigger the optimization; an LLM-based generation agent produces test programs based on the summarized requirements. Additionally, optimization-triggering tests are used as feedback to enhance the generation on the fly. Our evaluation on the three most popular DL compilers (i.e., PyTorch Inductor, TensorFlow-XLA, and TensorFlow Lite) shows WhiteFox can generate high-quality test programs to exercise deep optimizations, practicing up to 8X more than state-of-the-art fuzzers. WhiteFox has found 101 bugs for the DL compilers, with 92 confirmed as previously unknown and 70 fixed. WhiteFox has been acknowledged by the PyTorch team and is being incorporated into its development workflow. Beyond DL compilers, WhiteFox can also be adapted for compilers in different domains.

cs.SE↗

Evaluating Language Models for Efficient Code Generation

We introduce Differential Performance Evaluation (DPE), a framework designed to reliably evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient code generation. Traditional coding benchmarks often fail to provide reliable insights into code efficiency, due to their reliance on simplistic test inputs and the absence of effective compound metrics. DPE addresses these issues by focusing on efficiency-demanding programming tasks and establishing an insightful compound metric for performance evaluation. DPE operates in two phases: To curate efficiency datasets, it selects efficiency-demanding tasks from existing coding benchmarks and generates computationally expensive inputs to stress the efficiency of LLM solutions. To assess the code efficiency, DPE profiles the new solution and compares it globally against a set of reference solutions that exhibit distinct efficiency levels, where the matched level defines its efficiency score. As a proof of concept, we use DPE to create EvalPerf, a benchmark with 121 performance-challenging coding tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation draws interesting findings on the efficiency impact of model sizes, instruction tuning, and prompting. For example, while the scaling law fails to account for code efficiency, general instruction tuning benefits both code correctness and efficiency. We also evaluate the evaluation by examining the effectiveness of DPE, showing that EvalPerf is reliable and convenient to use even across platforms.

cs.SE↗

When Automated Program Repair Meets Regression Testing -- An Extensive Study on 2 Million Patches

In recent years, Automated Program Repair (APR) has been extensively studied in academia and even drawn wide attention from industry. However, APR techniques can be extremely time consuming since (1) a large number of patches can be generated for a given bug, and (2) each patch needs to be executed on the original tests to ensure its correctness. In the literature, various techniques (e.g., based on learning, mining, and constraint solving) have been proposed/studied to reduce the number of patches. Intuitively, every patch can be treated as a software revision during regression testing; thus, traditional Regression Test Selection (RTS) techniques can be leveraged to only execute the tests affected by each patch (as the other tests would keep the same outcomes) to further reduce patch execution time. However, few APR systems actually adopt RTS and there is still a lack of systematic studies demonstrating the benefits of RTS and the impact of different RTS strategies on APR. To this end, this paper presents the first extensive study of widely-used RTS techniques at different levels (i.e., class/method/statement levels) for 12 state-of-the-art APR systems on over 2M patches. Our study reveals various practical guidelines for bridging the gap between APR and regression testing.

cs.SE↗

RepoQA: Evaluating Long Context Code Understanding

Recent advances have been improving the context windows of Large Language Models (LLMs). To quantify the real long-context capabilities of LLMs, evaluators such as the popular Needle in a Haystack have been developed to test LLMs over a large chunk of raw texts. While effective, current evaluations overlook the insight of how LLMs work with long-context code, i.e., repositories. To this end, we initiate the RepoQA benchmark to evaluate LLMs on long-context code understanding. Traditional needle testers ask LLMs to directly retrieve the answer from the context without necessary deep understanding. In RepoQA, we built our initial task, namely Searching Needle Function (SNF), which exercises LLMs to search functions given their natural-language description, i.e., LLMs cannot find the desired function if they cannot understand the description and code. RepoQA is multilingual and comprehensive: it includes 500 code search tasks gathered from 50 popular repositories across 5 modern programming languages. By evaluating 26 general and code-specific LLMs on RepoQA, we show (i) there is still a small gap between the best open and proprietary models; (ii) different models are good at different languages; and (iii) models may understand code better without comments.

cs.SE↗

Magicoder: Empowering Code Generation with OSS-Instruct

We introduce Magicoder, a series of fully open-source (code, weights, and data) Large Language Models (LLMs) for code that significantly closes the gap with top code models while having no more than 7B parameters. Magicoder models are trained on 75K synthetic instruction data using OSS-Instruct, a novel approach to enlightening LLMs with open-source code snippets to generate diverse instruction data for code. Our main motivation is to mitigate the inherent bias of the synthetic data generated by LLMs through the wealth of open-source references for the production of more realistic and controllable data. The orthogonality of OSS-Instruct and other data generation methods like Evol-Instruct further enables us to build an enhanced MagicoderS. Both Magicoder and MagicoderS substantially outperform state-of-the-art code models with similar or even larger sizes on a wide range of coding benchmarks. Notably, MagicoderS-CL-7B based on CodeLlama even surpasses the prominent ChatGPT on HumanEval+ (66.5 vs. 65.9 in pass@1 ). Overall, OSS-Instruct opens a new direction for crafting diverse synthetic instruction data for code using abundant open-source references.

cs.CL↗

XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts

We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM (<3B) with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13% on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2% to 13% on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ise-uiuc/xft.

cs.CL↗

Top Leaderboard Ranking = Top Coding Proficiency, Always? EvoEval: Evolving Coding Benchmarks via LLM

LLMs have become the go-to choice for code generation tasks, with an exponential increase in the training, development, and usage of LLMs specifically for code generation. To evaluate the ability of LLMs on code, both academic and industry practitioners rely on popular handcrafted benchmarks. However, prior benchmarks contain only a very limited set of problems, both in quantity and variety. Further, due to popularity and age, many benchmarks are prone to data leakage where example solutions can be readily found on the web and thus potentially in training data. Such limitations inevitably lead us to inquire: Is the leaderboard performance on existing benchmarks reliable and comprehensive enough to measure the program synthesis ability of LLMs? To address this, we introduce EvoEval -- a program synthesis benchmark suite created by evolving existing benchmarks into different targeted domains for a comprehensive evaluation of LLM coding abilities. Our study on 51 LLMs shows that compared to the high performance obtained on standard benchmarks like HumanEval, there is a significant drop in performance (on average 39.4%) when using EvoEval. Additionally, the decrease in performance can range from 19.6% to 47.7%, leading to drastic ranking changes amongst LLMs and showing potential overfitting of existing benchmarks. Furthermore, we showcase various insights, including the brittleness of instruction-following models when encountering rewording or subtle changes as well as the importance of learning problem composition and decomposition. EvoEval not only provides comprehensive benchmarks, but can be used to further evolve arbitrary problems to keep up with advances and the ever-changing landscape of LLMs for code. We have open-sourced our benchmarks, tools, and complete LLM generations at https://github.com/evo-eval/evoeval

cs.SE↗

StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation

The BigCode project, an open-scientific collaboration focused on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs), introduces StarCoder2. In partnership with Software Heritage (SWH), we build The Stack v2 on top of the digital commons of their source code archive. Alongside the SWH repositories spanning 619 programming languages, we carefully select other high-quality data sources, such as GitHub pull requests, Kaggle notebooks, and code documentation. This results in a training set that is 4x larger than the first StarCoder dataset. We train StarCoder2 models with 3B, 7B, and 15B parameters on 3.3 to 4.3 trillion tokens and thoroughly evaluate them on a comprehensive set of Code LLM benchmarks. We find that our small model, StarCoder2-3B, outperforms other Code LLMs of similar size on most benchmarks, and also outperforms StarCoderBase-15B. Our large model, StarCoder2- 15B, significantly outperforms other models of comparable size. In addition, it matches or outperforms CodeLlama-34B, a model more than twice its size. Although DeepSeekCoder- 33B is the best-performing model at code completion for high-resource languages, we find that StarCoder2-15B outperforms it on math and code reasoning benchmarks, as well as several low-resource languages. We make the model weights available under an OpenRAIL license and ensure full transparency regarding the training data by releasing the SoftWare Heritage persistent IDentifiers (SWHIDs) of the source code data.

cs.SE↗

Copiloting the Copilots: Fusing Large Language Models with Completion Engines for Automated Program Repair

During Automated Program Repair (APR), it can be challenging to synthesize correct patches for real-world systems in general-purpose programming languages. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be helpful "copilots" in assisting developers with various coding tasks, and have also been directly applied for patch synthesis. However, most LLMs treat programs as sequences of tokens, meaning that they are ignorant of the underlying semantics constraints of the target programming language. This results in plenty of statically invalid generated patches, impeding the practicality of the technique. Therefore, we propose Repilot, a general code generation framework to further copilot the AI "copilots" (i.e., LLMs) by synthesizing more valid patches during the repair process. Our key insight is that many LLMs produce outputs autoregressively (i.e., token by token), resembling human writing programs, which can be significantly boosted and guided through a Completion Engine. Repilot synergistically synthesizes a candidate patch through the interaction between an LLM and a Completion Engine, which 1) prunes away infeasible tokens suggested by the LLM and 2) proactively completes the token based on the suggestions provided by the Completion Engine. Our evaluation on a subset of the widely-used Defects4j 1.2 and 2.0 datasets shows that Repilot outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by fixing 27% and 47% more bugs, respectively. Moreover, Repilot produces more valid and correct patches than the base LLM with the same budget. While we focus on leveraging Repilot for APR in this work, the overall approach is also generalizable to other code generation tasks.

cs.SE↗

Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation

Program synthesis has been long studied with recent approaches focused on directly using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. Programming benchmarks, with curated synthesis problems and test-cases, are used to measure the performance of various LLMs on code synthesis. However, these test-cases can be limited in both quantity and quality for fully assessing the functional correctness of the generated code. Such limitation in the existing benchmarks begs the following question: In the era of LLMs, is the code generated really correct? To answer this, we propose EvalPlus -- a code synthesis evaluation framework to rigorously benchmark the functional correctness of LLM-synthesized code. EvalPlus augments a given evaluation dataset with large amounts of test-cases newly produced by an automatic test input generator, powered by both LLM- and mutation-based strategies. While EvalPlus is general, we extend the test-cases of the popular HumanEval benchmark by 80x to build HumanEval+. Our extensive evaluation across 26 popular LLMs (e.g., GPT-4 and ChatGPT) demonstrates that HumanEval+ is able to catch significant amounts of previously undetected wrong code synthesized by LLMs, reducing the pass@k by up-to 19.3-28.9%. We also surprisingly found that test insufficiency can lead to mis-ranking. For example, both WizardCoder-CodeLlama and Phind-CodeLlama now outperform ChatGPT on HumanEval+, while none of them could on HumanEval. Our work not only indicates that prior popular code synthesis evaluation results do not accurately reflect the true performance of LLMs for code synthesis, but also opens up a new direction to improve such programming benchmarks through automated testing. We have open-sourced our tools, enhanced datasets as well as all LLM-generated code at https://github.com/evalplus/evalplus to facilitate and accelerate future LLM-for-code research.

cs.SE↗

NeuRI: Diversifying DNN Generation via Inductive Rule Inference

Deep Learning (DL) is prevalently used in various industries to improve decision-making and automate processes, driven by the ever-evolving DL libraries and compilers. The correctness of DL systems is crucial for trust in DL applications. As such, the recent wave of research has been studying the automated synthesis of test-cases (i.e., DNN models and their inputs) for fuzzing DL systems. However, existing model generators only subsume a limited number of operators, lacking the ability to pervasively model operator constraints. To address this challenge, we propose NeuRI, a fully automated approach for generating valid and diverse DL models composed of hundreds of types of operators. NeuRI adopts a three-step process: (i) collecting valid and invalid API traces from various sources; (ii) applying inductive program synthesis over the traces to infer the constraints for constructing valid models; and (iii) using hybrid model generation which incorporates both symbolic and concrete operators. Our evaluation shows that NeuRI improves branch coverage of TensorFlow and PyTorch by 24% and 15% over the state-of-the-art model-level fuzzers. NeuRI finds 100 new bugs for PyTorch and TensorFlow in four months, with 81 already fixed or confirmed. Of these, 9 bugs are labelled as high priority or security vulnerability, constituting 10% of all high-priority bugs of the period. Open-source developers regard error-inducing tests reported by us as "high-quality" and "common in practice".

cs.SE↗

Large Language Models are Edge-Case Fuzzers: Testing Deep Learning Libraries via FuzzGPT

Deep Learning (DL) library bugs affect downstream DL applications, emphasizing the need for reliable systems. Generating valid input programs for fuzzing DL libraries is challenging due to the need for satisfying both language syntax/semantics and constraints for constructing valid computational graphs. Recently, the TitanFuzz work demonstrates that modern Large Language Models (LLMs) can be directly leveraged to implicitly learn all the constraints to generate valid DL programs for fuzzing. However, LLMs tend to generate ordinary programs following similar patterns seen in their massive training corpora, while fuzzing favors unusual inputs that cover edge cases or are unlikely to be manually produced. To fill this gap, this paper proposes FuzzGPT, the first technique to prime LLMs to synthesize unusual programs for fuzzing. FuzzGPT is built on the well-known hypothesis that historical bug-triggering programs may include rare/valuable code ingredients important for bug finding. Traditional techniques leveraging such historical information require intensive human efforts to design dedicated generators and ensure the validity of generated programs. FuzzGPT demonstrates that this process can be fully automated via the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs (including fine-tuning and in-context learning), while being generalizable and applicable to challenging domains. While FuzzGPT can be applied with different LLMs, this paper focuses on the powerful GPT-style models: Codex and CodeGen. Moreover, FuzzGPT also shows the potential of directly leveraging the instruct-following capability of the recent ChatGPT for effective fuzzing. Evaluation on two popular DL libraries (PyTorch and TensorFlow) shows that FuzzGPT can substantially outperform TitanFuzz, detecting 76 bugs, with 49 already confirmed as previously unknown bugs, including 11 high-priority bugs or security vulnerabilities.

cs.SE↗

Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Fuzzers: Fuzzing Deep-Learning Libraries via Large Language Models

Detecting bugs in Deep Learning (DL) libraries (e.g., TensorFlow/PyTorch) is critical for almost all downstream DL systems in ensuring effectiveness/safety for end users. Meanwhile, traditional fuzzing techniques can be hardly effective for such a challenging domain since the input DL programs need to satisfy both the input language (e.g., Python) syntax/semantics and the DL API input/shape constraints for tensor computations. To address these limitations, we propose TitanFuzz - the first approach to directly leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate input programs for fuzzing DL libraries. LLMs are titanic models trained on billions of code snippets and can auto-regressively generate human-like code snippets. Our key insight is that modern LLMs can also include numerous code snippets invoking DL library APIs in their training corpora, and thus can implicitly learn both language syntax/semantics and intricate DL API constraints for valid DL program generation. More specifically, we use both generative and infilling LLMs (e.g., Codex/InCoder) to generate and mutate valid/diverse input DL programs for fuzzing. Our experimental results demonstrate that TitanFuzz can achieve 30.38%/50.84% higher code coverage than state-of-the-art fuzzers on TensorFlow/PyTorch. Furthermore, TitanFuzz is able to detect 65 bugs, with 41 already confirmed as previously unknown bugs. This paper demonstrates that modern titanic LLMs can be leveraged to directly perform both generation-based and mutation-based fuzzing studied for decades, while being fully automated, generalizable, and applicable to domains challenging for traditional approaches (such as DL systems). We hope TitanFuzz can stimulate more work in this promising direction of LLMs for fuzzing.

cs.SE↗

Attention: Not Just Another Dataset for Patch-Correctness Checking

Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have drawn wide attention from both academia and industry. Meanwhile, one main limitation with the current state-of-the-art APR tools is that patches passing all the original tests are not necessarily the correct ones wanted by developers, i.e., the plausible patch problem. To date, various Patch-Correctness Checking (PCC) techniques have been proposed to address this important issue. However, they are only evaluated on very limited datasets as the APR tools used for generating such patches can only explore a small subset of the search space of possible patches, posing serious threats to external validity to existing PCC studies. In this paper, we construct an extensive PCC dataset (the largest manually labeled PCC dataset to our knowledge) to revisit all state-of-the-art PCC techniques. More specifically, our PCC dataset includes 1,988 patches generated from the recent PraPR APR tool, which leverages highly-optimized bytecode-level patch executions and can exhaustively explore all possible plausible patches within its large predefined search space (including well-known fixing patterns from various prior APR tools). Our extensive study of representative PCC techniques on the new dataset has revealed various surprising findings and provided guidelines for future PCC research.

cs.SE↗

Fuzzing Automatic Differentiation in Deep-Learning Libraries

Deep learning (DL) has attracted wide attention and has been widely deployed in recent years. As a result, more and more research efforts have been dedicated to testing DL libraries and frameworks. However, existing work largely overlooked one crucial component of any DL system, automatic differentiation (AD), which is the basis for the recent development of DL. To this end, we propose $\nabla$Fuzz, the first general and practical approach specifically targeting the critical AD component in DL libraries. Our key insight is that each DL library API can be abstracted into a function processing tensors/vectors, which can be differentially tested under various execution scenarios (for computing outputs/gradients with different implementations). We have implemented $\nabla$Fuzz as a fully automated API-level fuzzer targeting AD in DL libraries, which utilizes differential testing on different execution scenarios to test both first-order and high-order gradients, and also includes automated filtering strategies to remove false positives caused by numerical instability. We have performed an extensive study on four of the most popular and actively-maintained DL libraries, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, and OneFlow. The result shows that $\nabla$Fuzz substantially outperforms state-of-the-art fuzzers in terms of both code coverage and bug detection. To date, $\nabla$Fuzz has detected 173 bugs for the studied DL libraries, with 144 already confirmed by developers (117 of which are previously unknown bugs and 107 are related to AD). Remarkably, $\nabla$Fuzz contributed 58.3% (7/12) of all high-priority AD bugs for PyTorch and JAX during a two-month period. None of the confirmed AD bugs were detected by existing fuzzers.

cs.SE↗

Conversational Automated Program Repair

Automated Program Repair (APR) can help developers automatically generate patches for bugs. Due to the impressive performance obtained using Large Pre-Trained Language Models (LLMs) on many code related tasks, researchers have started to directly use LLMs for APR. However, prior approaches simply repeatedly sample the LLM given the same constructed input/prompt created from the original buggy code, which not only leads to generating the same incorrect patches repeatedly but also miss the critical information in testcases. To address these limitations, we propose conversational APR, a new paradigm for program repair that alternates between patch generation and validation in a conversational manner. In conversational APR, we iteratively build the input to the model by combining previously generated patches with validation feedback. As such, we leverage the long-term context window of LLMs to not only avoid generating previously incorrect patches but also incorporate validation feedback to help the model understand the semantic meaning of the program under test. We evaluate 10 different LLM including the newly developed ChatGPT model to demonstrate the improvement of conversational APR over the prior LLM for APR approach.

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NNSmith: Generating Diverse and Valid Test Cases for Deep Learning Compilers

Deep-learning (DL) compilers such as TVM and TensorRT are increasingly being used to optimize deep neural network (DNN) models to meet performance, resource utilization and other requirements. Bugs in these compilers can result in models whose semantics differ from the original ones, producing incorrect results that corrupt the correctness of downstream applications. However, finding bugs in these compilers is challenging due to their complexity. In this work, we propose a new fuzz testing approach for finding bugs in deep-learning compilers. Our core approach consists of (i) generating diverse yet valid DNN test models that can exercise a large part of the compiler's transformation logic using light-weight operator specifications; (ii) performing gradient-based search to find model inputs that avoid any floating-point exceptional values during model execution, reducing the chance of missed bugs or false alarms; and (iii) using differential testing to identify bugs. We implemented this approach in NNSmith which has found 72 new bugs for TVM, TensorRT, ONNXRuntime, and PyTorch to date. Of these 58 have been confirmed and 51 have been fixed by their respective project maintainers.

cs.LG↗

Fuzzing Deep-Learning Libraries via Automated Relational API Inference

A growing body of research has been dedicated to DL model testing. However, there is still limited work on testing DL libraries, which serve as the foundations for building, training, and running DL models. Prior work on fuzzing DL libraries can only generate tests for APIs which have been invoked by documentation examples, developer tests, or DL models, leaving a large number of APIs untested. In this paper, we propose DeepREL, the first approach to automatically inferring relational APIs for more effective DL library fuzzing. Our basic hypothesis is that for a DL library under test, there may exist a number of APIs sharing similar input parameters and outputs; in this way, we can easily "borrow" test inputs from invoked APIs to test other relational APIs. Furthermore, we formalize the notion of value equivalence and status equivalence for relational APIs to serve as the oracle for effective bug finding. We have implemented DeepREL as a fully automated end-to-end relational API inference and fuzzing technique for DL libraries, which 1) automatically infers potential API relations based on API syntactic or semantic information, 2) synthesizes concrete test programs for invoking relational APIs, 3) validates the inferred relational APIs via representative test inputs, and finally 4) performs fuzzing on the verified relational APIs to find potential inconsistencies. Our evaluation on two of the most popular DL libraries, PyTorch and TensorFlow, demonstrates that DeepREL can cover 157% more APIs than state-of-the-art FreeFuzz. To date, DeepREL has detected 162 bugs in total, with 106 already confirmed by the developers as previously unknown bugs. Surprisingly, DeepREL has detected 13.5% of the high-priority bugs for the entire PyTorch issue-tracking system in a three-month period. Also, besides the 162 code bugs, we have also detected 14 documentation bugs (all confirmed).

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