visarga

visarga t1_iqsob64 wrote

Cool down. It's not that revolutionary as it sounds.

First of all, they reuse a code model.

> Our model is initialized with a standard encoder-decoder transformer model based on T5 (Raffel et al., 2020).

They use this model to randomly perturb the code of the proposed model.

> Given an initial source code snippet, the model is trained to generate a modified version of that code snippet. The specific modification applied is arbitrary

Then they use evolutionary methods - a population of candidates and a genetic mutation and selection process.

> Source code candidates that produce errors are discarded entirely, and the source code candidate with the lowest average training loss in extended few-shot evaluation is kept as the new query code

A few years ago we had black box optimisation papers using sophisticated probability estimation to pick the next candidate. It was an interesting subfield. This paper just takes random attempts.

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