Calibration of Large Language Models on Code Summarization

• Published in: Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering Vol. 2; no. FSE; pp. 2944 - 2964
• Main Authors: Virk, Yuvraj, Devanbu, Premkumar, Ahmed, Toufique
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 19.06.2025
• Subjects: Documentation; Software and its engineering; Software maintenance tools; Code Summarization; LLMs; Calibration
• ISSN: 2994-970X; 2994-970X
• DOI: 10.1145/3729400

A brief, fluent, and relevant summary can be helpful during program comprehension; however, such a summary does require significant human effort to produce. Often, good summaries are unavailable in software projects, which makes maintenance more difficult. There has been a considerable body of research into automated AI-based methods, using Large Language models (LLMs), to generate summaries of code; there also has been quite a bit of work on ways to measure the performance of such summarization methods, with special attention paid to how closely these AI-generated summaries resemble a summary a human might have produced. Measures such as BERTScore and BLEU have been suggested and evaluated with human-subject studies. However, LLM-generated summaries can be inaccurate, incomplete, etc: generally, too dissimilar to one that a good developer might write. Given an LLM-generated code summary, how can a user rationally judge if a summary is sufficiently good and reliable? Given just some input source code, and an LLM-generated summary, existing approaches can help judge brevity, fluency and relevance of the summary; however, it’s difficult to gauge whether an LLM-generated summary sufficiently resembles what a human might produce, without a “golden” human-produced summary to compare against. Prior research indicates that human-produced summaries are generally preferred by human-raters, so we explore this issue in this paper. We study this resemblance question as a calibration problem: given just the code & the summary from an LLM, can we compute a confidence measure, that provides a reliable indication of whether the summary sufficiently resembles what a human would have produced in this situation? We examine this question using several LLMs, for several languages, and in several different settings. Our investigation suggests approaches to provide reliable predictions of the likelihood that an LLM-generated summary would sufficiently resemble a summary a human might write for the same code.