Towards Learning (Dis)-Similarity of Source Code from Program Contrasts

Yangruibo Ding, Luca Buratti, Saurabh Pujar, Alessandro Morari, Baishakhi Ray, Saikat Chakraborty


Abstract
Understanding the functional (dis)-similarity of source code is significant for code modeling tasks such as software vulnerability and code clone detection. We present DISCO (DIS-similarity of COde), a novel self-supervised model focusing on identifying (dis)similar functionalities of source code. Different from existing works, our approach does not require a huge amount of randomly collected datasets. Rather, we design structure-guided code transformation algorithms to generate synthetic code clones and inject real-world security bugs, augmenting the collected datasets in a targeted way. We propose to pre-train the Transformer model with such automatically generated program contrasts to better identify similar code in the wild and differentiate vulnerable programs from benign ones. To better capture the structural features of source code, we propose a new cloze objective to encode the local tree-based context (e.g., parents or sibling nodes). We pre-train our model with a much smaller dataset, the size of which is only 5% of the state-of-the-art models’ training datasets, to illustrate the effectiveness of our data augmentation and the pre-training approach. The evaluation shows that, even with much less data, DISCO can still outperform the state-of-the-art models in vulnerability and code clone detection tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.436
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6300–6312
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.436
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.436
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yangruibo Ding, Luca Buratti, Saurabh Pujar, Alessandro Morari, Baishakhi Ray, and Saikat Chakraborty. 2022. Towards Learning (Dis)-Similarity of Source Code from Program Contrasts. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6300–6312, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Learning (Dis)-Similarity of Source Code from Program Contrasts (Ding et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.436.pdf
Data
CodeXGLUE