CoCoMIC: Code Completion by Jointly Modeling In-file and Cross-file Context

Abstract

While pre-trained language models (LM) for code have achieved great success in code completion, they generate code conditioned only on the contents within the file, i.e., in-file context, but ignore the rich semantics in other files within the same project, i.e., project-level cross-file context, a critical source of information that is especially useful in modern modular software development. Such overlooking constrains code LMs’ capacity in code completion, leading to unexpected behaviors such as generating hallucinated class member functions or function calls with unexpected arguments. In this work, we propose CoCoMIC, a novel framework that jointly learns the in-file and cross-file context on top of code LMs. To empower CoCoMIC, we develop CCFinder, a static-analysis-based tool that locates and retrieves the most relevant project-level cross-file context for code completion. CoCoMIC successfully improves the existing code LM with a 33.94% relative increase in exact match and 28.69% in identifier matching for code completion when the cross-file context is provided. Finally, we perform a series of ablation studies and share valuable insights for future research on integrating cross-file context into code LMs.