Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
2-2021
Abstract
Recently program learning techniques have been proposed to process source code based on syntactical structures (e.g., Abstract Syntax Trees) and/or semantic information (e.g., Dependency Graphs). While graphs may be better at capturing various viewpoints of code semantics than trees, constructing graph inputs from code need static code semantic analysis that may not be accurate and introduces noise during learning. On the other hand, syntax trees are precisely defined according to the language grammar and easier to construct and process than graphs. We propose a new tree-based learning technique, named TreeCaps, by fusing capsule networks with tree-based convolutional neural networks, to achieve learning accuracy higher than existing graph-based techniques while it is based only on trees. TreeCaps introduces novel variableto-static routing algorithms into the capsule networks to compensate for the loss of previous routing algorithms. Aside from accuracy, we also find that TreeCaps is the most robust to withstand those semantic-preserving program transformations that change code syntax without modifying the semantics. Evaluated on a large number of Java and C/C++ programs, TreeCaps models outperform prior deep learning models of program source code, in terms of both accuracy and robustness for program comprehension tasks such as code functionality classification and function name prediction. The implementation of TreeCaps is publicly available at https://github.com/bdqnghi/treecaps.
Discipline
OS and Networks | Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Conference, February 2-9
First Page
1
Last Page
9
Publisher
AAAI
City or Country
Virtual Conference
Citation
BUI, Duy Quoc Nghi; YU, Yijun; and JIANG, Lingxiao.
TreeCaps: Tree-based capsule networks for source code processing. (2021). Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Conference, February 2-9. 1-9.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6701
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://www.aaai.org/AAAI21Papers/AAAI-9746.BuiNDQ.pdf