SE Factual Knowledge in Frozen Giant Code Model: A Study on FQN and Its Retrieval

Giant pre-trained code models (PCMs) start coming into the developers’ daily practices. Understanding the type and amount of software knowledge in PCMs is essential for integrating PCMs into software engineering (SE) tasks and unlocking their potential. In this work, we conduct the first systematic study on the SE factual knowledge in the state-of-the-art PCM CoPilot, focusing on APIs’ Fully Qualified Names (FQNs), the fundamental knowledge for effective code analysis, search and reuse. Driven by FQNs’ data distribution properties, we design a novel lightweight in-context learning on Copilot for FQN inference, which does not require code compilation as traditional methods or gradient update by recent FQN prompt-tuning. We systematically experiment with five in-context learning design factors to identify the best configuration for practical use. With this best configuration, we investigate the impact of example prompts and FQN data properties on CoPilot's FQN inference capability. Our results confirm that CoPilot stores diverse FQN knowledge and can be applied for FQN inference due to its high accuracy and non-reliance on code analysis. Additionally, our extended study shows that the in-context learning method can be generalized to retrieve other SE factual knowledge embedded in giant PCMs. Furthermore, we find that the advanced general model GPT-4 also stores substantial SE knowledge. Comparing FQN inference between CoPilot and GPT-4, we observe that as model capabilities improve, the same prompts yield better results. Based on our experience interacting with Copilot, we discuss various opportunities to improve human-CoPilot interaction in the FQN inference task.