Whatever business a company may be in, software plays an increasingly vital role, from managing inventory to interfacing with customers. Software developers, as a result, are in greater demand than ever, and that’s driving the push to automate some of the easier tasks that take up their time.
Productivity tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio suggest snippets of code that developers can easily drop into their work as they write. These automated features are powered by sophisticated language models that have learned to read and write computer code after absorbing thousands of examples. But like other deep learning models trained on big datasets without explicit instructions, language models designed for code-processing have baked-in vulnerabilities.
“Unless you’re really careful, a hacker can subtly manipulate inputs to these models to make them predict anything,” says Shashank Srikant, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re trying to study and prevent that.”
In a new paper, Srikant and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab unveil an automated method for finding weaknesses in code-processing models, and retraining them to be more resilient against attacks. It’s part of a broader effort by MIT researcher Una-May O’Reilly and IBM-affiliated researcher Sijia Liu to harness AI to make automated programming tools smarter and more secure. The team will present its results next month at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
A machine capable of programming itself once seemed like science fiction. But an exponential rise in computing power, advances in natural language processing, and a glut of free code on the internet have made it possible to automate at least some aspects of software design.
To read full news: https://news.mit.edu/2021/toward-deep-learning-models-that-can-reason-about-code-like-humans-0415