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Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by pylua on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @08:47PM (#37773630)
I wonder if llm are biased towards older, more insecure implementations because there is a higher volume of old code vs new code.

Same thing with the data it is trained on — not all code requires all levels of refinement. Most of the data is probably around average.

Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by squigz on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @08:53PM (#37773665)
I'm not sure that code being newer inherently means it will be more secure
Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by pylua on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @09:07PM (#37773771)
I don’t think it is a tautology , but I can imagine a cve scanner picking up older code with log4j where newer code may avoid that library altogether, just as an example.

Since there is more older code than newer code would the llm be suspectible to that ?

Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by xmcqdpt2 on Thursday October 05, 2023 @07:20AM (#37777166)
Everyone still uses log4j after the fix. There aren't many full-featured alternatives... and the one that exist probably contain unfixed bugs.
Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by darkerside on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @10:00PM (#37774101)
> Most of the data is probably around average.

I know this is not how distributions work, but I had to chuckle at the literal interpretation of this.

Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by d-z-m on Thursday October 05, 2023 @05:43AM (#37776612)
I'd say the data is pretty normal.
Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by foota on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @11:04PM (#37774494)
This makes me wonder about training an LLM on one language and then fine tuning it for another. If you train over only, say, JavaScript, and then finetune for C, I imagine it will be quite bad at writing safe code, even if it makes the code look like C, because it didn't have to learn about freeing and such.

Similarly, would it pick up patterns from one language and keep then in the other? Maybe an LLM trained on Kotlin would be more likely to write functional code finetuned.

Re:Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub by fragmede on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @11:14PM (#37774551)
Given that dataset anomalies can result in LLM output corruption, I'm not convinced that cross-training like that would even work.