Context-aware Code Summary Generation
<|reference_start|>Context-aware Code Summary Generation: Code summary generation is the task of writing natural language descriptions of a section of source code. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI-based technologies have helped make automatic code summarization a reality. However, the summaries these approaches write tend to focus on a narrow area of code. The results are summaries that explain what that function does internally, but lack a description of why the function exists or its purpose in the broader context of the program. In this paper, we present an approach for including this context in recent LLM-based code summarization. The input to our approach is a Java method and that project in which that method exists. The output is a succinct English description of why the method exists in the project. The core of our approach is a 350m parameter language model we train, which can be run locally to ensure privacy. We train the model in two steps. First we distill knowledge about code summarization from a large model, then we fine-tune the model using data from a study of human programmer who were asked to write code summaries. We find that our approach outperforms GPT-4 on this task.<|reference_end|>
@article{su2024context-aware,
    title={Context-aware Code Summary Generation},
    author={Chia-Yi Su, Aakash Bansal, Yu Huang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Collin McMillan},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.09006},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.09006},
    primaryClass={cs.SE}
}