# Interpreting Performance Profiles with Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02729/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06333/) (2021)
- [IntelliCode Compose: Code Generation Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08025/) (2020)
- [Learning to Represent Programs with Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00740/) (2017)
- [code2seq: Generating Sequences from Structured Representations of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01400/) (2018)
- [Improving Automatic Source Code Summarization via Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07234/) (2018)
- [A Convolutional Attention Network for Extreme Summarization of Source Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03001/) (2016)
- [Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02843/) (2020)
- [CoTexT: Multi-task Learning with Code-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08645/) (2021)
- [Multilingual training for Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02043/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DJXPerf: Identifying Memory Inefficiencies via Object-centric Profiling for Java](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03388/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Profiling tools (also known as profilers) play an important role in understanding program performance at runtime, such as hotspots, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies. While profilers have been proven to be useful, they give extra burden to software engineers. Software engineers, as the users, are responsible to interpret the complex performance data and identify actionable optimization in program source code. However, it can be challenging for users to associate inefficiencies with the program semantics, especially if the users are not the authors of the code, which limits the applicability of profilers. In this thesis, we explore a new direction to combine performance profiles and program semantics with a deep learning approach. The key idea is to glean code summary for semantic information (at a certain level) and integrate it into a profiler, which can better understand program inefficiencies for actionable optimization. To be concrete, we combine profiles generated by Async Profiler (the state-of-the-art Java profiler) with code summarization from a fine-tuned CodeBERT-based model. We demonstrate the code summaries of any selected call path in a graphic user interface. Our system can effectively assist analysis on many Java benchmarks.