Source Code Summarization

Description from the archive archive 2025-07-28.

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

9 leaderboard tables shown for this task, 9 with rows (a “benchmark” on this site is a table with at least one row, as on /sota), ordered by row count. “Best model” is the first row in the archive's own order at snapshot; nothing is re-ranked here and metric direction is not recorded in the archive. PwC's Trend sparklines are not in the archive, so that column is omitted.

Syntology column: samples harvested from the paper's repositories and executed on synthesized fixtures; “ran” is not a correctness claim and does not order the table. A dash means no Syntology record for that paper, not a recorded non-run. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.

Libraries

Not in the archive: the export carries no per-task library table, so there is nothing to show at snapshot 2025-07-28.

Datasets archive 2025-07-28

7 datasets whose archive record lists this task, ordered by the archive's paper count.

Subtasks archive 2025-07-28

1 subtask in the archive's task tree.

Most implemented papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 39 papers with code (58 tagged with this task in all), ordered by repositories listed in the archive, not by stars (the archive holds no stars, so PwC's “Social” and “Latest” sorts cannot be reproduced). Papers without a page here are shown as plain text.

• A Transformer-based Approach for Source Code Summarization
  1 May 2020 9 repositories listed
  Generating a readable summary that describes the functionality of a program is known as source code summarization.
• Recommendations for Datasets for Source Code Summarization
  4 Apr 2019 7 repositories listed
  The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.
• code2seq: Generating Sequences from Structured Representations of Code
  4 Aug 2018 6 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 3 samples · 3 unverified
  The ability to generate natural language sequences from source code snippets has a variety of applications such as code summarization, documentation, and retrieval.
• Structured Neural Summarization
  5 Nov 2018 3 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 17 samples · 17 unverified
  Summarization of long sequences into a concise statement is a core problem in natural language processing, requiring non-trivial understanding of the input.
• HAConvGNN: Hierarchical Attention Based Convolutional Graph Neural Network for Code Documentation Generation in Jupyter Notebooks
  31 Mar 2021 2 repositories listed
  Jupyter notebook allows data scientists to write machine learning code together with its documentation in cells.
• Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation
  10 Mar 2021 2 repositories listed
  Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models.
• Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network
  6 Apr 2020 2 repositories listed
  The first approaches to use structural information flattened the AST into a sequence.
• Code Generation as a Dual Task of Code Summarization
  14 Oct 2019 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 4 of 7 samples · 3 unverified · 3 pointer-only (licence)
  Code summarization (CS) and code generation (CG) are two crucial tasks in the field of automatic software development.
• Improving Automatic Source Code Summarization via Deep Reinforcement Learning
  17 Nov 2018 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 3 samples · 1 unverified · 3 pointer-only (licence)
  To the best of our knowledge, most state-of-the-art approaches follow an encoder-decoder framework which encodes the code into a hidden space and then decode it into natural language space, suffering from two major…
• Variational Prefix Tuning for Diverse and Accurate Code Summarization Using Pre-trained Language Models
  14 May 2025 1 repository listed
  Recent advancements in source code summarization have leveraged transformer-based pre-trained models, including Large Language Models of Code (LLMCs), to automate and improve the generation of code summaries.
• Source Code Summarization in the Era of Large Language Models
  9 Jul 2024 1 repository listed
  We hope that our findings can provide a comprehensive understanding of code summarization in the era of LLMs.
• A Prompt Learning Framework for Source Code Summarization
  26 Dec 2023 1 repository listed
  Our comprehensive experimental results show that PromptCS significantly outperforms instruction prompting schemes (including zero-shot learning and few-shot learning) on all four widely used metrics, and is comparable…
• Revisiting File Context for Source Code Summarization
  5 Sep 2023 1 repository listed
  Source code summarization is the task of writing natural language descriptions of source code.
• Distilled GPT for Source Code Summarization
  28 Aug 2023 1 repository listed
  A code summary is a brief natural language description of source code.
• Semantic Similarity Loss for Neural Source Code Summarization
  14 Aug 2023 1 repository listed
  This paper presents a procedure for and evaluation of using a semantic similarity metric as a loss function for neural source code summarization.
• Statement-based Memory for Neural Source Code Summarization
  21 Jul 2023 1 repository listed
  For example, by taking the entire subroutine as input to a Transformer or RNN-based encoder.
• Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization
  18 May 2023 1 repository listed
  In this paper, we propose a fine-grained Token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism (Tram) on the decoder side rather than the encoder side to enhance the performance of neural models and produce more low-frequency…
• An Extractive-and-Abstractive Framework for Source Code Summarization
  15 Jun 2022 1 repository listed
  The extractive module in the framework performs a task of extractive code summarization, which takes in the code snippet and predicts important statements containing key factual details.
• M2TS: Multi-Scale Multi-Modal Approach Based on Transformer for Source Code Summarization
  18 Mar 2022 1 repository listed
  They use the learned code representations as input to code summarization models, which can accordingly generate summaries describing source code.
• Source Code Summarization with Structural Relative Position Guided Transformer
  14 Feb 2022 1 repository listed
  We further show that how the proposed SCRIPT captures the structural relative dependencies.
• Compositionality-Aware Graph2Seq Learning
  28 Jan 2022 1 repository listed
  It is expected that the compositionality in a graph can be associated to the compositionality in the output sequence in many graph2seq tasks.
• Assemble Foundation Models for Automatic Code Summarization
  13 Jan 2022 1 repository listed
  Thereby, we propose a flexible and robust approach for automatic code summarization, based on neural models.
• Leveraging Unsupervised Learning to Summarize APIs Discussed in Stack Overflow
  27 Nov 2021 1 repository listed
  Automated source code summarization is a task that generates summarized information about the purpose, usage, and--or implementation of methods and classes to support understanding of these code entities.
• Modeling Hierarchical Syntax Structure with Triplet Position for Source Code Summarization
  16 Nov 2021 1 repository listed
  In this paper, we propose CODESCRIBE to model the hierarchical syntax structure of code by introducing a novel triplet position for code summarization.
• GraphSearchNet: Enhancing GNNs via Capturing Global Dependencies for Semantic Code Search
  4 Nov 2021 1 repository listed
  Specifically, we propose to construct graphs for the source code and queries with bidirectional GGNN (BiGGNN) to capture the local structural information of the source code and queries.
• On the Evaluation of Neural Code Summarization
  15 Jul 2021 1 repository listed
  To achieve a profound understanding of how far we are from solving this problem and provide suggestions to future research, in this paper, we conduct a systematic and in-depth analysis of 5 state-of-the-art neural code…
• Code to Comment Translation: A Comparative Study on Model Effectiveness & Errors
  15 Jun 2021 1 repository listed
  Automated source code summarization is a popular software engineering research topic wherein machine translation models are employed to "translate" code snippets into relevant natural language descriptions.
• CoDesc: A Large Code-Description Parallel Dataset
  29 May 2021 1 repository listed Syntology ran 1 of 8 samples · 7 unverified
  In this study, we present CoDesc -- a large parallel dataset composed of 4.
• CodeTrans: Towards Cracking the Language of Silicon's Code Through Self-Supervised Deep Learning and High Performance Computing
  6 Apr 2021 1 repository listed
  Simultaneously, the transformer model, especially its combination with transfer learning, has been proven to be a powerful technique for natural language processing tasks.
• Project-Level Encoding for Neural Source Code Summarization of Subroutines
  22 Mar 2021 1 repository listed
  Source code summarization of a subroutine is the task of writing a short, natural language description of that subroutine.

Syntology lines on 5 of the papers shown; no Syntology record for the others (a paper without an arXiv id cannot be joined to the graph, and absence from the graph layer is not a recorded non-run). “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized fixture, not that the paper's result was reproduced. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.