Timezone: »

 
Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation
Shun Zhang · Zhenfang Chen · Yikang Shen · Mingyu Ding · Josh Tenenbaum · Chuang Gan

@
in Foundation Models for Decision Making »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=LM1Nt6YHRwe »

Existing large language model-based code generation pipelines typically use beam search or sampling algorithms during the decoding process. Although the programs they generate achieve high token-matching-based scores, they often fail to compile or generate incorrect outputs. The main reason is that conventional Transformer decoding algorithms may not be the best choice for code generation. In this work, we propose a novel Transformer decoding algorithm, Planning-Guided Transformer Decoding (PG-TD), that uses a planning algorithm to do lookahead search and guide the Transformer to generate better programs. Specifically, instead of simply optimizing the likelihood of the generated sequences, the Transformer makes use of a planner that generates complete programs and tests them on public test cases. The Transformer can therefore make more informed decisions and generate tokens that will eventually lead to higher-quality programs. We also design a mechanism that shares information between the Transformer and the planner to make our algorithm computationally efficient. We empirically evaluate our framework with several large language models as backbones on public coding challenge benchmarks, showing that 1) it can generate programs that consistently achieve higher performance compared with competing baseline methods; 2) it enables controllable code generation, such as concise codes and highly-commented codes by optimizing modified objective.

Author Information

Shun Zhang (University of Michigan)
Zhenfang Chen (The University of Hong Kong)
Yikang Shen (MIT-IBM Watson Lab)
Mingyu Ding (The University of Hong Kong)
Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)

Josh Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from MIT in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002. He studies learning and inference in humans and machines, with the twin goals of understanding human intelligence in computational terms and bringing computers closer to human capacities. He focuses on problems of inductive generalization from limited data -- learning concepts and word meanings, inferring causal relations or goals -- and learning abstract knowledge that supports these inductive leaps in the form of probabilistic generative models or 'intuitive theories'. He has also developed several novel machine learning methods inspired by human learning and perception, most notably Isomap, an approach to unsupervised learning of nonlinear manifolds in high-dimensional data. He has been Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive Science, has been active on program committees for the CogSci and NIPS conferences, and has co-organized a number of workshops, tutorials and summer schools in human and machine learning. Several of his papers have received outstanding paper awards or best student paper awards at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), NIPS, and Cognitive Science conferences. He is the recipient of the New Investigator Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology (2005), the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2007), and the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (in the area of cognition and human learning) from the American Psychological Association (2008).

Chuang Gan (UMass Amherst/ MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)

More from the Same Authors