NLPerturbator: Studying the Robustness of Code LLMs to Natural Language Variations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large language models achieve promising results in code generation based on a given natural language description. They have been integrated into open source projects and commercial products to facilitate daily coding activities. The natural language description in the prompt is crucial for LLMs to comprehend users’ requirements. Prior studies have uncovered that LLMs are sensitive to changes in the prompts, including slight changes that look inconspicuous. However, the natural language descriptions often vary in real-world scenarios (e.g., different formats, grammar, and wording). Prior studies on the robustness of LLMs were often based on random perturbations, and such perturbations may not actually happen. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive study to investigate how code LLMs are robust to variations of natural language descriptions in real-world scenarios. We summarize 18 categories of perturbations of natural language and three combinations of co-occurred categories based on our literature review and online survey with practitioners. We propose an automated framework, NLPerturbator, which can perform perturbations of each category given a set of prompts. Through a series of experiments on code generation using sevencode LLMs, we find that the perturbed prompts can decrease the performance of code generation by a considerable margin. Our study highlights the importance of enhancing the robustness of LLMs to real-world variations in the prompts, as well as the essentiality of attentively constructing the prompts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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".