Pre-trained Model-based Actionable Warning Identification: A Feasibility Study

Actionable Warning Identification (AWI) plays a pivotal role in improving the usability of Static Code Analyzers (SCAs). Currently, Machine Learning (ML)-based AWI approaches, which mainly learn an AWI classifier from labeled warnings, are notably common. However, these approaches still face the problem of restricted performance due to the direct reliance on a limited number of labeled warnings to develop a classifier. Very recently, Pre-trained Models (PTMs), which have been trained through billions of text/code tokens and have demonstrated substantial successful applications in various code-related tasks, could potentially address the above problem. Nevertheless, the performance of PTMs on AWI has not been systematically investigated, leaving a gap in understanding their pros and cons. In this article, we are the first to explore the feasibility of applying various PTMs for AWI. By conducting an extensive evaluation on 12K+ warnings involving four commonly used SCAs (i.e., SpotBugs, Infer, CppCheck, and CSA) and three typical programming languages (i.e., Java, C, and C++), we (1) investigate the overall PTM-based AWI performance compared to the state-of-the-art ML-based AWI approach, (2) analyze the impact of three primary aspects (i.e., data preprocessing, model training, and model prediction) in the typical PTM-based AWI workflow, and (3) identify the reasons for the current underperformance of PTMs on AWI, thereby obtaining a series of findings. Based on the above findings, we further provide several potential directions to enhance PTM-based AWI.