Beyond Self-learned Attention: Mitigating Attention Bias In Transformer-based Models Using Attention Guidance

Gesi Jiri, Ahmed Iftekhar. Arxiv 2024

[Paper]    
Attention Mechanism Ethics And Bias Fine Tuning Model Architecture Pretraining Methods Reinforcement Learning Training Techniques Transformer

Transformer-based models have demonstrated considerable potential for source code modeling tasks in software engineering. However, they are limited by their dependence solely on automatic self-attention weight learning mechanisms. Previous studies have shown that these models overemphasize delimiters added by tokenizers (e.g., [CLS], [SEP]), which may lead to overlooking essential information in the original input source code. To address this challenge, we introduce SyntaGuid, a novel approach that utilizes the observation that attention weights tend to be biased towards specific source code syntax tokens and abstract syntax tree (AST) elements in fine-tuned language models when they make correct predictions. SyntaGuid facilitates the guidance of attention-weight learning, leading to improved model performance on various software engineering tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of SyntaGuid on multiple tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in overall performance without requiring additional data. Experimental result shows that SyntaGuid can improve overall performance up to 3.25% and fix up to 28.3% wrong predictions. Our work represents the first attempt to guide the attention of Transformer-based models towards critical source code tokens during fine-tuning, highlighting the potential for enhancing Transformer-based models in software engineering.

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