đź’« StarCoder: A Revolutionary Code Generation Model

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Author

muhtasham

Published

May 22, 2023

Starry night in San Francisco Image by Author

Are you tired of spending hours writing repetitive code? Do you find yourself searching through documentation and Stack Overflow for code snippets? Look no further! Introducing StarCoder, the ultimate code generation model that will revolutionize your coding experience.

Understanding StarCoder

The Power of 15 Billion Parameters

The Power of 15 Billion Parameters: StarCoder is a cutting-edge code generation model that boasts an impressive 15 billion parameters. Built on a decoder architecture, this model has been fine-tuned to excel in generating high-quality code across various programming languages.

Trained on The Stack

The Stack, a vast collection of programming languages and metadata with a staggering 6.4 TB of permissively licensed code, served as the training ground for StarCoder. With 800GB of code spanning 86 popular programming languages, including GitHub Issues, Jupyter Notebooks, and Git Commits, StarCoder has acquired a deep understanding of diverse codebases.

Recent Techniques for Enhanced Performance

StarCoder utilizes advanced techniques such as Multi Query Attention and Flash Attention to optimize memory usage and improve context length. With an impressive context window of 8,192 tokens, equivalent to several pages of code, StarCoder enables you to generate comprehensive code snippets.

StarPII: Safeguarding Privacy

Before training StarCoder, a separate model called StarPII was developed to ensure the removal of personally identifiable information (PII) such as IP addresses, names, and passwords. This commitment to data privacy ensures the responsible use of code generation capabilities.

Outperforming the Giants

In rigorous Human Evaluation (Human Eval) benchmarks, StarCoder surpassed many large models, including PaLM 1 540B and LLaMa 66. StarCoder’s superior performance is a testament to its finely tuned code generation capabilities.

Unleashing the Power of StarCoder

With StarCoder, the possibilities are endless. Let’s explore some exciting use cases where StarCoder’s productivity gains truly shine:

1. Efficient Code Generation

StarCoder simplifies code generation by automating repetitive tasks. With just a few lines of code, you can leverage StarCoder’s capabilities to generate code snippets tailored to your specific requirements. Whether you need a function definition or a complete code block, StarCoder has got you covered.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "bigcode/starcoderbase-1b"
device = "cuda"  # Set to "cuda" for GPU usage or "cpu" for CPU usage

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, trust_remote_code=True).to(device)

inputs = tokenizer.encode("def print_hello_world():", return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Pro Tip: You can use google collab to avoid memory issues

2. Fill-in-the-Middle Code Completion

StarCoder excels at fill-in-the-middle code completion tasks. By providing context and using special tokens, you can generate code snippets with missing parts accurately filled. This feature is particularly useful when you have an existing codebase and need to complete or modify code segments efficiently.

input_text = "<fim-prefix>def print_hello_world():\n    <fim-suffix>\n    print('Hello world!')<fim-middle>"
inputs = tokenizer.encode(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

3. Enhancing Reasoning and Conversational Tasks

Surprisingly, StarCoder demonstrates remarkable performance in reasoning and conversational tasks, despite not being explicitly trained on text data. The combination of well-crafted prompts and the model’s inherent reasoning abilities derived from code pre-training contribute to its success. In fact, in the Helm evaluation, StarCoder achieved scores comparable to models such as Anthropic V4 and GPT-3, which are significantly larger in size.

4. Interacting with StarCoder through Python API

For developers looking to integrate StarCoder’s capabilities directly into their Python applications, the model offers a straightforward API. Below, is a Python script that demonstrates how to interact with the StarCoder model using the Hugging Face API. You can use this script to query the model and get code generation results right in your Python environment:

import requests
import json 
import os

MODEL_ID = "bigcode/starcoder"
API_TOKEN = os.environ.get('HUGGINGFACE_API_TOKEN')

if not API_TOKEN:
    raise EnvironmentError("Please set your Hugging Face API token as an environment variable named 'HUGGINGFACE_API_TOKEN'")

def query(payload, model_id, api_token):
    headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_TOKEN}"}
    API_URL = f"https://api-inference.huggingface.co/models/{MODEL_ID}"
    response = requests.post(API_URL, headers=headers, json=payload)
    print("Status Code:", response.status_code)
    print("Response Content:", response.text)

    try:
        return response.json()
    except json.JSONDecodeError:
        print("Failed to decode the response as JSON.")
        return None

payload = {"inputs": "def convert_color_hsl_to_rgb(rgb_tuple):",    
            "parameters": {"max_new_tokens": 512},
}

data = query(payload, MODEL_ID, API_TOKEN)

In the script above, the API_TOKEN is obtained from an environment variable named HUGGINGFACE_API_TOKEN. You can set this environment variable in your operating system or in your Python environment before running the script. Remember to keep your API token confidential to prevent unauthorized access. You can obtain your API token from the Hugging Face website. Remember to keep your API token confidential to prevent unauthorized access.

This script uses the requests and json Python libraries to send a POST request to the Hugging Face API, passing a code snippet as the input and receiving a generated code snippet as the output. Remember to install the necessary Python packages by running pip install requests before using the script.

By using this script, developers can seamlessly integrate StarCoder’s code generation capabilities into their Python applications, enhancing productivity and efficiency in coding tasks.

Fine-tuning and Commercial Use

StarCoder offers the flexibility of fine-tuning to cater to specific use cases. By following the steps provided in the GitHub repository, you can fine-tune the model according to your requirements. This makes StarCoder an ideal choice for enterprises with strict usage requirements and specialized code generation needs.

Furthermore, StarCoder is available for commercial use, enabling businesses to leverage its power to boost productivity and efficiency in their software development workflows.

Training Insights

For those curious about the technical aspects of StarCoder’s training, here are some key details:

  • Architecture: StarCoder is built upon the GPT-2 model, utilizing multi-query attention and the Fill-in-the-Middle objective.
  • Pretraining Steps: StarCoder underwent 600K pretraining steps to acquire its vast code generation capabilities.
  • Pretraining Tokens: During pretraining, StarCoder processed a staggering 236 billion tokens, allowing it to learn from an extensive corpus of code.
  • Precision: StarCoder was trained with float16 precision, striking a balance between training efficiency and model performance.

Open-Source Community

StarCoder is not just a powerful code generation model, but also an open-source project driven by a collaborative community. The development of StarCoder has been made possible by the collective efforts of developers, researchers, and coding enthusiasts like yourself.

Contributions from community members play a crucial role in refining and expanding the capabilities of StarCoder. If you’re eager to contribute to this revolutionary project, you can join the official Slack community by filling out the form on BigCode’s website. By becoming a part of the community, you can actively shape the future of code generation and make a meaningful impact in the field.

The collaborative spirit of StarCoder fosters innovation, encourages knowledge sharing, and ensures that the model remains dynamic and adaptive to the evolving needs of developers and organizations worldwide.

Chat with the model here: StarCoder Chat

For models, demos, papers, VSCode extensions, and more, visit: Big-Code Official Space

Unleash the power of StarCoder, embrace collaboration, and revolutionize your coding journey today!