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ASE 2021
Sun 14 - Sat 20 November 2021 Australia
Thu 18 Nov 2021 19:20 - 19:40 at Kangaroo - Developers Chair(s): Chetan Arora

Neural models of code are successfully tackling various prediction tasks, complementing and sometimes even outperforming traditional program analysis. While most work focuses on end-to-end evaluations of such models, it often remains unclear what the models actually learn, and to what extent their reasoning about code matches that of skilled humans. A poor understanding of the model reasoning risks deploying models that are right for the wrong reason, and taking decisions based on spurious correlations in the training dataset. This paper investigates to what extent the attention weights of effective neural models match the reasoning of skilled humans. To this end, we present a methodology for recording human attention and use it to gather 1,508 human attention maps from 91 participants, which is the largest such dataset we are aware of. Computing human-model correlations shows that the copy attention of neural models often matches the way humans reason about code (Spearman rank coefficients of 0.49 and 0.47), which gives an empirical justification for the intuition behind copy attention. In contrast, the regular attention of models is mostly uncorrelated to human attention. We find that models and humans sometimes focus on different kinds of tokens, e.g., strings are important to humans but mostly ignored by models. The results also show that human-model agreement positively correlates with accurate predictions by a model, which calls for neural models that even more closely mimic human reasoning. Beyond the insights from our study, we envision the release of our dataset of human attention maps to help understand future neural models of code and to foster work on human-inspired models.

Thu 18 Nov

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

19:00 - 20:00
DevelopersResearch Papers / Industry Showcase / NIER track at Kangaroo
Chair(s): Chetan Arora Deakin University
19:00
20m
Talk
Automating Developer Chat Mining
Research Papers
Shengyi Pan Zhejiang University, Lingfeng Bao Zhejiang University, Xiaoxue Ren Zhejiang University, Xin Xia Huawei Software Engineering Application Technology Lab, David Lo Singapore Management University, Shanping Li Zhejiang University
19:20
20m
Talk
Thinking Like a Developer? Comparing the Attention of Humans with Neural Models of Code
Research Papers
Matteo Paltenghi University of Stuttgart, Michael Pradel University of Stuttgart
Pre-print Media Attached
19:40
10m
Talk
Infrastructure in Code: Towards developer-friendly cloud applications
Industry Showcase
Vladislav Tankov Higher School of Economics, JetBrains, JetBrains Research, Dmitriy Valchuk JetBrains, ITMO University, Yaroslav Golubev JetBrains Research, Timofey Bryksin JetBrains Research; HSE University
Pre-print
19:50
10m
Talk
Towards Fluid Software Architectures: Bidirectional Human-AI Interaction
NIER track
Ammar Yasser German University in Cairo, Mervat Abu-Elkheir German University in Cairo