An Empirical Study of the Non-Determinism of ChatGPT in Code Generation

There has been a recent explosion of research on Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering tasks, in particular code generation. However, results from LLMs can be highly unstable; non-deterministically returning very different code for the same prompt. Such non-determinism affects the correctness and consistency of the generated code, undermines developers’ trust in LLMs, and yields low reproducibility in LLM-based papers. Nevertheless, there is no work investigating how serious this non-determinism threat is. To fill this gap, this article conducts an empirical study on the non-determinism of ChatGPT in code generation. We chose to study ChatGPT because it is already highly prevalent in the code…

• UR
  UK Research and Innovation

  Award: EP/S023356/1