Papers › PerfCodeGen: Improving Performance of LLM Generated Code with Execution Feedback

PerfCodeGen: Improving Performance of LLM Generated Code with Execution Feedback

18 Nov 2024arXiv:2412.03578archive 2025-07-28

Yun Peng, Akhilesh Deepak Gotmare, Michael Lyu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Doyen Sahoo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted for assisting in software development tasks, yet their performance evaluations have narrowly focused on the functional correctness of generated code. Human programmers, however, require LLM-generated code to be not only correct but also optimally efficient. We propose PerfCodeGen, a training-free framework that enhances the performance of LLM-generated code by incorporating feedback based on runtime during test case execution into the self-refinement iterations. With PerfCodeGen, we achieve speedups for a significantly higher proportion of problems compared to using the base LLM with sophisticated prompting techniques. Applied to open language models like Phi-3-mini, PerfCodeGen achieves runtime efficiency comparable to prompting powerful closed models like GPT-4. We achieve state-of-the-art runtime efficiency on benchmarks such as HumanEval, MBPP, and APPS, frequently surpassing the ground truth reference solutions with PerfCodeGen using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing code quality across a range of open LLMs of varying sizes including Phi-3-mini, Llama 3 8B, Mixtral 8x7B, Command R, and Llama 3 70B.

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBASEBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3GPT-4LLaMALabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight Decay

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