Assessing the Performance of AI-Generated Code: A Case Study on GitHub Copilot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software development tools like GitHub Copilot holds the promise of transforming code generation processes. While AI-driven code generation presents numerous advantages for software development, code generated by large language models may introduce challenges related to security, privacy, and copyright issues. However, the performance implications of AI-generated code remain insufficiently explored. This study conducts an empirical analysis focusing on the performance regressions of code generated by GitHub Copilot across three distinct datasets: HumanEval, AixBench, and MBPP. We adopt a comprehensive methodology encompassing static and dynamic performance analyses to assess the effectiveness of the generated code. Our findings reveal that although the generated code is functionally correct, it frequently exhibits performance regressions compared to code solutions crafted by humans. We further investigate the code-level root causes responsible for these performance regressions. We identify four major root causes, i.e., inefficient function calls, inefficient looping, inefficient algorithm, and inefficient use of language features. We further identify a total of ten sub-categories of root causes attributed to the performance regressions of generated code. Additionally, we explore prompt engineering as a potential strategy for optimizing performance. The outcomes suggest that meticulous prompt designs can enhance the performance of AI-generated code. This research offers valuable insights contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of AI-assisted code generation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".