The Scent of Deep Learning Code
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep learning practitioners are often interested in improving their model accuracy rather than the interpretability of their models. As a result, deep learning applications are inherently complex in their structures. They also need to continuously evolve in terms of code changes and model updates. Given these confounding factors, there is a great chance of violating the recommended programming practices by the developers in their deep learning applications. In particular, the code quality might be negatively affected due to their drive for the higher model performance. Unfortunately, the code quality of deep learning applications has rarely been studied to date. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the distribution of code smells in deep learning applications. To this end, we perform a comparative analysis between deep learning and traditional open-source applications collected from GitHub. We have several major findings. First, long lambda expression, long ternary conditional expression, and complex container comprehension smells are frequently found in deep learning projects. That is, deep learning code involves more complex or longer expressions than the traditional code does. Second, the number of code smells increases across the releases of deep learning applications. Third, we found that there is a co-existence between code smells and software bugs in the studied deep learning code, which confirms our conjecture on the degraded code quality of deep learning applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".