Fri 25 Oct 2024 17:00 - 17:20 at IBR West - Education and Language Usability Chair(s): Arjun Guha

Students often make mistakes in their introductory programming assignments as part of their learning process. Unfortunately, providing custom repairs for these mistakes can require a substantial amount of time and effort from class instructors. Automated program repair (APR) techniques can be used to synthesize such fixes. Prior work has explored the use of symbolic and neural techniques for APR in the education domain. Both types of approaches require either substantial engineering efforts or large amounts of data and training. We propose to use a large language model trained on code, such as Codex (a version of GPT), to build an APR system – PyDex – for introductory Python programming assignments. Our system can fix both syntactic and semantic mistakes by combining multi-modal prompts, iterative querying, test-case-based selection of few-shots, and program chunking. We evaluate PyDex on 286 real student programs and compare to three baselines, including one that combines a state-of-the-art Python syntax repair engine, BIFI, and a state-of-the-art Python semantic repair engine for student assignments, Refactory. We find that PyDex can fix more programs and produce smaller patches on average.

Fri 25 Oct

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

16:00 - 17:40
Education and Language UsabilityOOPSLA 2024 at IBR West
Chair(s): Arjun Guha Northeastern University; Roblox
16:00
20m
Talk
Forge: A Tool and Language for Teaching Formal Methods
OOPSLA 2024
Tim Nelson Brown University, Ben Greenman University of Utah, Siddhartha Prasad Brown University, Tristan Dyer Brown University, Ethan Bove Brown University, Qianfan Chen Brown University, Charlie Cutting Brown University, Thomas Del Vecchio Brown University, Sidney LeVine Brown University, Julianne Rudner Brown University, Benjamin Ryjikov Brown University, Alexander Varga Brown University, Andrew Wagner Northeastern University, Luke West Brown University, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University
DOI
16:20
20m
Talk
HiPy: Extracting High-Level Semantics From Python Code For Data Processing
OOPSLA 2024
Michael Jungmair Technical University of Munich, Alexis Engelke TU Munich, Jana Giceva Technical University of Munich
DOI
16:40
20m
Talk
Identifying and Correcting Programming Language Behavior MisconceptionsOOPSLA 2024 Distinguished Paper Award
OOPSLA 2024
Kuang-Chen Lu Brown University, USA, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University
DOI
17:00
20m
Talk
PyDex: Repairing Bugs in Introductory Python Assignments using LLMs
OOPSLA 2024
Jialu Zhang University of Waterloo, José Pablo Cambronero Google, USA, Sumit Gulwani Microsoft, Vu Le Microsoft, Ruzica Piskac Yale University, Gustavo Soares Microsoft, Gust Verbruggen Microsoft
DOI
17:20
20m
Talk
Profiling Programming Language LearningOOPSLA 2024 Distinguished Paper Award
OOPSLA 2024
Will Crichton Brown University, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University
DOI Pre-print