Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Daya Guo

Neelakantan Sundaresan

Alexey Svyatkovskiy

Miltiadis Allamanis

Shao Kun Deng

A code generation system uses a non-terminal expansion model and a non-terminal selector model to generate a code sketch to complete a partially-formed source code snippet. The non-terminal expansion model is a neural transformer model trained on a supervised dataset through reinforcement learning to learn to predict the production rule to expand for a given non-terminal symbol. The non-terminal selector model is trained through reinforcement learning to predict the non-terminal symbol to expand given a partial-code state. The models are used in a two-step beam search to generate the top candidate code sketches, where a candidate code sketch may contain a hole that represents an unexpanded non-terminal symbol.

Code generation with reinforcement learning

A code completion tool uses a neural transformer model with attention to generate syntactically-correct candidates with holes to complete a partially-formed code snippet. The model is trained to predict the expansion of non-terminal symbols of the production rules of the underlying grammar of the code snippet without being constrained to a left-to-right expansion order. A hole is a non-terminal symbol of the grammar of a programming language that marks a position in a candidate where the code completion engine is not certain of the production rule that should be used to expand the non-terminal symbol. The hole allows the code completion engine to expand other non-terminal symbols in a candidate and allow the user to guide the expansion of the holes in a candidate.

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Zhuhai, China

Daya Guo