Exploring Continual Learning for Code Generation Models

Prateek Yadav, Qing Sun, Hantian Ding, Xiaopeng Li, Dejiao Zhang, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Mohit Bansal, Bing Xiang


Abstract
Large-scale code generation models such as Copilot and CodeT5 have achieved impressive performance. However, libraries are upgraded or deprecated very frequently and re-training large-scale language models is computationally expensive. Therefore, Continual Learning (CL) is an important aspect that remains under-explored in the code domain. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called CodeTask-CL that covers a wide range of tasks, including code generation, translation, summarization, and refinement, with different input and output programming languages. Next, on our CodeTask-CL benchmark, we compare popular CL techniques from NLP and Vision domains. We find that effective methods like Prompt Pooling (PP) suffer from catastrophic forgetting due to the unstable training of the prompt selection mechanism caused by stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. We address this issue with our proposed method, Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing (PP-TF), that stabilizes training by enforcing constraints on the prompt selection mechanism and leads to a 21.54% improvement over Prompt Pooling. Along with the benchmark, we establish a training pipeline that can be used for CL on code models, which we believe can motivate further development of CL methods for code models.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.68
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
782–792
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.68
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.68
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prateek Yadav, Qing Sun, Hantian Ding, Xiaopeng Li, Dejiao Zhang, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Mohit Bansal, and Bing Xiang. 2023. Exploring Continual Learning for Code Generation Models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 782–792, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Continual Learning for Code Generation Models (Yadav et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.68.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.68.mp4