RFMC-CS: a representation fusion based multi-view momentum contrastive learning framework for code search

Abstract

Code search is a crucial task in software engineering, aiming to search relevant code from the codebase based on natural language queries. While deep-learning-based code search methods have demonstrated impressive performance, recent advances in contrastive learning have further enhanced the representation learning of these models. Despite these improvements, existing methods still have limitations in the representation learning of multi-modal data. Specifically, these methods suffer from a semantic loss in the representation learning of code and fail to explore functionally relevant code pairs in the representation learning fully. To address these limitations, we propose A Representation Fusion based Multi-View Momentum Contrastive Learning Framework for Code Search, named RFMC-CS. RFMC-CS effectively retains the semantic and structural information of code through multi-modal representation and fusion. Through elaborately designed Multi-View Momentum Contrastive Learning, RFMC-CS can further learn the correlations between different modalities of samples and semantic relevant samples. The experimental results on the CodeSearchNet benchmark show that RFMC-CS outperforms seven advanced baselines on MRR and Recall@k metrics. The ablation experiments illustrate the effectiveness of each component. The portability experiments show that RFMC-CS has good portability.