With the recent success of embeddings in natural language processing, research has been conducted into applying similar methods to code analysis. Most works attempt to process the code directly or use a syntactic tree representation, treating it like sentences written in a natural language. However, none of the existing methods are sufficient to comprehend program semantics robustly, due to structural features such as function calls, branching, and interchangeable order of statements. In this paper, we propose a novel processing technique to learn code semantics, and apply it to a variety of program analysis tasks. In particular, we stipulate that a robust distributional hypothesis of code applies to both human- and machine-generated programs. Following this hypothesis, we define an embedding space, inst2vec, based on an Intermediate Representation (IR) of the code that is independent of the source programming language. We provide a novel definition of contextual flow for this IR, leveraging both the underlying data- and control-flow of the program. We then analyze the embeddings qualitatively using analogies and clustering, and evaluate the learned representation on three different high-level tasks. We show that even without fine-tuning, a single RNN architecture and fixed inst2vec embeddings outperform specialized approaches for performance prediction (compute device mapping, optimal thread coarsening); and algorithm classification from raw code (104 classes), where we set a new state-of-the-art.
Previous works that use code embeddings do not evaluate the quality of the trained space on its own merit, but rather through the performance of subsequent (downstream) tasks. One exception is @cite_15 , who present empirical evidence of vector similarities for similar method names. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to quantify the quality of a code embedding space itself in the form of clustering, syntactic analogies, semantic analogies, and categorical distance tests.
@cite_15
2964150020
We present a neural model for representing snippets of code as continuous distributed vectors ( code embeddings''). The main idea is to represent a code snippet as a single fixed-length code vector, which can be used to predict semantic properties of the snippet. To this end, code is first decomposed to a collection of paths in its abstract syntax tree. Then, the network learns the atomic representation of each path while simultaneously learning how to aggregate a set of them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to predict a method's name from the vector representation of its body. We evaluate our approach by training a model on a dataset of 12M methods. We show that code vectors trained on this dataset can predict method names from files that were unobserved during training. Furthermore, we show that our model learns useful method name vectors that capture semantic similarities, combinations, and analogies. A comparison of our approach to previous techniques over the same dataset shows an improvement of more than 75 , making it the first to successfully predict method names based on a large, cross-project corpus. Our trained model, visualizations and vector similarities are available as an interactive online demo at http: code2vec.org. The code, data and trained models are available at https: github.com tech-srl code2vec.