1
Return

Optimizing Knowledge Utilization for Multi-Intent Comment Generation With Large Language Models

delete2026-04-28
delete0
PRE
AI
S
Shuochuan Li
Z
Zan Wang
X
Xiaoning Du
Z
Zhuo Wu
J
Jiuqiao Yu
J
Junjie Chen
DOI:10.1109/tse.2026.3687241delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Code comment generation aims to produce a generic overview of a code snippet, helping developers understand and maintain code. However, generic summaries alone are insufficient to meet the diverse needs of practitioners; for example, developers expect the implementation insights to be presented in an untangled manner, while users seek clear usage instructions. This highlights the necessity of multi-intent comment generation. With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code-related tasks, these models have been leveraged to tackle the challenge of multi-intent comment generation. Despite their successes, state-of-the-art LLM-based approaches often struggle to construct correct relationships among intents, code, and comments within a smaller number of demonstration examples. To mitigate this issue, we propose a framework named KUMIC for multi-intent comment generation. Built upon in-context learning, KUMIC leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to optimize knowledge utilization for LLMs to generate intent-specific comments. Specifically, KUMIC first designs a retrieval mechanism to obtain similar demonstration examples, which exhibit high code-comment consistency. Then, KUMIC leverages CoT to guide LLMs to focus on statements facilitating the derivation of code comments aligned with specific intents. In this context, KUMIC constructs a mapping knowledge chain — linking code to intent-specific statements to comments — which enables LLMs to follow similar reasoning steps when generating the desired comments. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate KUMIC, and the results demonstrate that KUMIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 14.49%, 22.41%, 20.72%, and 12.94% in terms of BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE-L, and SBERT, respectively.
Keywords:
Code summarization
large language model
in-context learning
chain-of-thought

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering cover
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IF:
5.6
Papers:
2.8K
Citations:
1.1W

Organization

T
tianjin university
Scholars:
7.7W
Papers: 5.6W
Citations: 88
U
university of california berkeley
Scholars:
1.1K
Papers: 665
Citations: 0
M
monash university
Scholars:
7.5K
Papers: 3.4K
Citations: 0
Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Citing Papers

Citing Papers