What You See Is Not Always What You Get: An Empirical Study of Code Comprehension by Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08098v2
• Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:21:37 GMT
• Title: What You See Is Not Always What You Get: An Empirical Study of Code Comprehension by Large Language Models
• Authors: Bangshuo Zhu, Jiawen Wen, Huaming Chen,
• Abstract summary: We investigate the vulnerability of large language models (LLMs) to imperceptible attacks, where hidden character manipulation in source code misleads LLMs' behaviour while remaining undetectable to human reviewers. These attacks include coding reordering, invisible coding characters, code deletions, and code homoglyphs. Our findings confirm the susceptibility of LLMs to imperceptible coding character attacks, while different LLMs present different negative correlations between perturbation magnitude and performance.
• Score: 0.5735035463793009
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• Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated outstanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in software engineering tasks, including code generation and comprehension. While LLMs have shown significant potential in assisting with coding, it is perceived that LLMs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerability of LLMs to imperceptible attacks, where hidden character manipulation in source code misleads LLMs' behaviour while remaining undetectable to human reviewers. We devise these attacks into four distinct categories and analyse their impacts on code analysis and comprehension tasks. These four types of imperceptible coding character attacks include coding reordering, invisible coding characters, code deletions, and code homoglyphs. To comprehensively benchmark the robustness of current LLMs solutions against the attacks, we present a systematic experimental evaluation on multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Our experimental design introduces two key performance metrics, namely model confidence using log probabilities of response, and the response correctness. A set of controlled experiments are conducted using a large-scale perturbed and unperturbed code snippets as the primary prompt input. Our findings confirm the susceptibility of LLMs to imperceptible coding character attacks, while different LLMs present different negative correlations between perturbation magnitude and performance. These results highlight the urgent need for robust LLMs capable of manoeuvring behaviours under imperceptible adversarial conditions. We anticipate this work provides valuable insights for enhancing the security and trustworthiness of LLMs in software engineering applications.

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