InverseCoder: Unleashing the Power of Instruction-Tuned Code LLMs with Inverse-Instruct

• Published in: arXiv.org
• Main Authors: Wu, Yutong, Huang, Di, Shi, Wenxuan, Wang, Wei, Gao, Lingzhe, Liu, Shihao, Ziyuan Nan, Yuan, Kaizhao, Zhang, Rui, Zhang, Xishan, Du, Zidong, Guo, Qi, Pu, Yewen, Yin, Dawei, Hu, Xing, Chen, Yunji
• Format: Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 08.07.2024
• Subjects: Coding; Large language models; Misalignment; Source code; Translating
• ISSN: 2331-8422

Recent advancements in open-source code large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable coding abilities by fine-tuning on the data generated from powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for instruction tuning. This paper explores how to further improve an instruction-tuned code LLM by generating data from itself rather than querying closed-source LLMs. Our key observation is the misalignment between the translation of formal and informal languages: translating formal language (i.e., code) to informal language (i.e., natural language) is more straightforward than the reverse. Based on this observation, we propose INVERSE-INSTRUCT, which summarizes instructions from code snippets instead of the reverse. Specifically, given an instruction tuning corpus for code and the resulting instruction-tuned code LLM, we ask the code LLM to generate additional high-quality instructions for the original corpus through code summarization and self-evaluation. Then, we fine-tune the base LLM on the combination of the original corpus and the self-generated one, which yields a stronger instruction-tuned LLM. We present a series of code LLMs named InverseCoder, which surpasses the performance of the original code LLMs on a wide range of benchmarks, including Python text-to-code generation, multilingual coding, and data-science code generation.