When Less Is More: Monolingual Fine-Tuning of Language Models for Industrial C# Code Review
Code review is essential for maintaining software quality but remains time-consuming and cognitively demanding, especially in industrial environments. While language models (LMs) have shown promise in automating code review tasks, most prior work targets dominant programming languages such as Java and Python, leaving industrially relevant languages like C# underexplored. This study presents an empirical evaluation of monolingual C#-specific fine-tuning of three architecturally diverse open-source LMs — a review-specialized pretrained model, a code-pretrained large language model, and a general-purpose instruction-tuned model — across three core automated code review tasks: Code Change Quality Estimation, Review Comment Generation, and Code Refinement. The review-specialized model was fine-tuned across all three tasks, while the two larger models were fine-tuned exclusively for comment generation due to computational constraints, using a dataset combining public benchmarks with proprietary industrial repositories. We systematically examined the effects of programming-language scope (C#-only vs. multilingual baselines) and natural-language composition (English-only vs. English–German), using both automated metrics and expert-based human evaluations. Our results reveal that the benefits of monolingual fine-tuning are task-dependent: C#-specific adaptation improves review-worthiness detection and enhances lexical alignment and human-perceived quality in comment generation, yet it reduces performance in code refinement, where broader multilingual pretraining proves more effective. English-only fine-tuning consistently outperforms bilingual configurations in comment quality. Across all tasks, fine-tuned LMs offer substantial efficiency gains over human reviewers, but human judgment remains superior for semantically complex and context-sensitive assessments, suggesting that LMs are best deployed as assistive tools within hybrid review workflows.
Tue 19 MayDisplayed time zone: Seoul change
16:00 - 17:30 | Machine Learning for Code Analysis & ReviewResearch Papers / Industry at Room 103 Chair(s): Dietmar Pfahl University of Tartu | ||
16:00 25mTalk | Understanding and Improving ML-based Static Analysis Result Classification via Explainable AI Research Papers Sai Yerramreddy University of Maryland, Mohammad Rafieian The University of Texas at Dallas, Shiyi Wei University of Texas at Dallas, Adam Porter University of Maryland, College Park | ||
16:25 25mTalk | Adaptive Mixing of Embeddings from Multiple Code Language Models for Fault Localization Research Papers Juyoung Yang Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Eunchan Park Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), In-Young Ko Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology | ||
16:50 25mTalk | Assessing the Impact of Code Changes on the Fault Localizability of Large Language Models Research Papers Sabaat Haroon Virginia tech, Ahmand Faraz Khan Virginia Tech, Ahmad Humayun Virginia Tech, Waris Gill Virginia Tech, Abdul Haddi Amjad Palo Alto Networks, Ali R. Butt Virginia Tech, Mohammad Taha Khan Carnegie Mellon University, Muhammad Ali Gulzar Virginia Tech | ||
17:15 15mTalk | When Less Is More: Monolingual Fine-Tuning of Language Models for Industrial C# Code Review Industry Igli Begolli Technical University Dortmund, Lovion GmbH, Meltem Aksoy TU Dortmund University, Daniel Neider Technical University of Dortmund, Germany | ||