# Structured Code Representations Enable Data-Efficient Adaptation of Code Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10716 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10716/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [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)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15533/) (2022)
- [CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01780/) (2022)
- [Devign: Effective Vulnerability Identification by Learning Comprehensive Program Semantics via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03496/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03511/) (2020)
- [Learning to Represent Programs with Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00740/) (2017)
- [Learning to Mine Aligned Code and Natural Language Pairs from Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08949/) (2018)
- [Language to Logical Form with Neural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.01280/) (2016)
- [Mapping Language to Code in Programmatic Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09588/) (2018)
- [Tree-to-tree Neural Networks for Program Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03691/) (2018)
- [Abstract Syntax Networks for Code Generation and Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07535/) (2017)
- [A Convolutional Attention Network for Extreme Summarization of Source Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03001/) (2016)
- [TRANX: A Transition-based Neural Abstract Syntax Parser for Semantic Parsing and Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02720/) (2018)
- [Code Prediction by Feeding Trees to Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13848/) (2020)
- [DOBF: A Deobfuscation Pre-Training Objective for Programming Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07492/) (2021)
- [Language-Agnostic Representation Learning of Source Code from Structure and Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11318/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Continual Learning of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16789/) (2024)
- [Scalable Multi-Domain Adaptation of Language Models using Modular Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10181/) (2024)
- [LOOPRAG: Enhancing Loop Transformation Optimization with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15766/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current language models tailored for code tasks often adopt the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm from natural language processing, modeling source code as plain text. This approach, however, overlooks the unambiguous structures inherent in programming languages. In this work, we explore data-efficient adaptation of pre-trained code models by further pre-training and fine-tuning them with program structures. Specifically, we represent programs as parse trees -- also known as concrete syntax trees (CSTs) -- and adapt pre-trained models on serialized CSTs. Although the models that we adapt have been pre-trained only on the surface form of programs, we find that a small amount of continual pre-training and fine-tuning on CSTs without changing the model architecture yields improvements over the baseline approach across various code tasks. The improvements are found to be particularly significant when there are limited training examples, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating program structures with plain-text representation even when working with backbone models that have not been pre-trained with structures.