Classifying source code: How far can compressor-based classifiers go?

• Main Author: YANG, Zhou
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Defect Software Prediction; Efficient Learning; Robustness; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8920; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9923/viewcontent/3639478.3641229_pvoa_cc_by.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Pre-trained language models of code, which are built upon large-scale datasets, millions of trainable parameters, and high computational resources cost, have achieved phenomenal success. Recently, researchers have proposed a compressor-based classifier (Cbc); it trains no parameters but is found to outperform BERT. We conduct the first empirical study to explore whether this lightweight alternative can accurately classify source code. Our study is more than applying Cbc to code-related tasks. We first identify an issue that the original implementation overestimates Cbc. After correction, Cbc's performance on defect prediction drops from 80.7% to 63.0%, which is still comparable to CodeBERT (63.7%). We find that hyperparameter settings affect the performance. Besides, results show that Cbc can outperform CodeBERT when the training data is small, making it a good alternative in low-resource settings.