# Neuro-symbolic Zero-Shot Code Cloning with Cross-Language Intermediate Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00859/) (2021)
- [CodeXGLUE: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04664/) (2021)
- [CodeSearchNet Challenge: Evaluating the State of Semantic Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09436/) (2019)
- [GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08366/) (2020)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06333/) (2021)
- [UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03850/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-based Approach for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00653/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Code Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04973/) (2020)
- [Language-Agnostic Representation Learning of Source Code from Structure and Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11318/) (2021)
- [SynCoBERT: Syntax-Guided Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-Training for Code Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04556/) (2021)
- [Evaluating the Impact of Model Scale for Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12253/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Code Retrieval and Summarization via Semantic-Preserving Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02731/) (2020)
- [TreeBERT: A Tree-Based Pre-Trained Model for Programming Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12485/) (2021)
- [ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08006/) (2021)
- [On the Compositional Generalization Gap of In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08473/) (2022)
- [Towards Learning (Dis)-Similarity of Source Code from Program Contrasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03868/) (2021)
- [CODE-MVP: Learning to Represent Source Code from Multiple Views with Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02029/) (2022)
- [MISIM: A Neural Code Semantics Similarity System Using the Context-Aware Semantics Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05265/) (2020)
- [GypSum: Learning Hybrid Representations for Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12916/) (2022)
- [Unified Abstract Syntax Tree Representation Learning for Cross-Language Program Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00424/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Neuro-Symbolic AI: Explainability, Challenges, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04383/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap: Representation Spaces in Neuro-Symbolic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04393/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we define a neuro-symbolic approach to address the task of finding semantically similar clones for the codes of the legacy programming language COBOL, without training data. We define a meta-model that is instantiated to have an Intermediate Representation (IR) in the form of Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) common across codes in C and COBOL. We linearize the IRs using Structure Based Traversal (SBT) to create sequential inputs. We further fine-tune UnixCoder, the best-performing model for zero-shot cross-programming language code search, for the Code Cloning task with the SBT IRs of C code-pairs, available in the CodeNet dataset. This allows us to learn latent representations for the IRs of the C codes, which are transferable to the IRs of the COBOL codes. With this fine-tuned UnixCoder, we get a performance improvement of 12.85 MAP@2 over the pre-trained UniXCoder model, in a zero-shot setting, on the COBOL test split synthesized from the CodeNet dataset. This demonstrates the efficacy of our meta-model based approach to facilitate cross-programming language transfer.