Code Generation Tools (Almost) for Free? A Study of Few-Shot, Pre-Trained Language Models on Code

Understand

Few-shot learning with large-scale, pre-trained language models is a powerful way to answer questions about code, e.g., how to complete a given code example, or even generate code snippets from scratch.

• The success of these models raises the question whether they could serve as a basis for building a wide range code generation tools.
• Traditionally, such tools are built manually and separately for each task.
• Instead, few-shot learning may allow to obtain different tools from a single pre-trained language model by simply providing a few examples or a natural language description of the expected tool behavior.