Regression Language Models for Code

Yash Akhauri, Xingyou Song, Arissa Wongpanich, Bryan Lewandowski, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah

Keywords: LLM, Decoding-based regression, Code, Regression, LLMs For Code

TL;DR: We introduce a regression language model that can predict, from text descriptions, code execution memory and latencies, in addition to neural network accuracies.

Abstract: We study **code-to-metric regression**: predicting numeric outcomes of code executions, a challenging task due to the open-ended nature of programming languages. While prior methods have resorted to heavy and domain-specific feature engineering, we show that a single unified Regression Language Model (RLM) can simultaneously predict directly from text, (i) the memory footprint of code across multiple high-level languages such as Python and C++, (ii) the latency of Triton GPU kernels, and (iii) the accuracy and speed of trained neural networks represented in ONNX. In particular, a relatively small 300M parameter RLM initialized from T5Gemma, obtains $>$0.9 Spearman-rank on competitive programming submissions from APPS, and a single unified model achieves $>$0.5 average Spearman-rank across 17 separate languages from CodeNet. Furthermore, the RLM can obtain the highest average Kendall-Tau of 0.46 on five classic NAS design spaces previously dominated by graph neural networks, and simultaneously predict architecture latencies on numerous hardware platforms.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 14043