Contrastive Code Representation Learning
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Machine-aided programming tools such as automated type predictors and autocomplete are increasingly learning-based. However, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised learning with task-specific datasets. We propose Contrastive Code Representation Learning (ContraCode), a self-supervised algorithm for learning task-agnostic semantic representations of programs via contrastive learning. Our approach uses no human-provided labels, only the raw text of programs. ContraCode optimizes for a representation that is invariant to semantic-preserving code transformations. We develop an automated source-to-source compiler that generates textually divergent variants of source programs. We then train a neural network to identify variants of anchor programs within a large batch of non-equivalent negatives. To solve this task, the network must extract features representing the functionality, not form, of the program. In experiments, we pre-train ContraCode with 1.8M unannotated JavaScript methods mined from GitHub, then transfer to downstream tasks by fine-tuning. Pre-training with ContraCode consistently improves the F1 score of code summarization baselines by up to 8 and top-1 accuracy of type inference baselines by up to 13 ContraCode achieves 9 current state-of-the-art static type analyzer for TypeScript.
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