When applying LLM-based code generation to software development projects that follow a feature-driven or rapid application development approach, it becomes necessary to estimate the functional correctness of the generated code in the absence of test cases. Just as a user selects a relevant document from a ranked list of retrieved ones, a software generation workflow requires a developer to choose (and potentially refine) a generated solution from a ranked list of alternative solutions, ordered by their posterior likelihoods. This implies that estimating the quality of a ranked list -- akin to estimating "relevance" for query performance prediction (QPP) in IR -- is also crucial for generative software development, where quality is defined in terms of "functional correctness". In this paper, we propose an in-context learning (ICL) based approach for code quality estimation. Our findings demonstrate that providing few-shot examples of functionally correct code from a training set enhances the performance of existing QPP approaches as well as a zero-shot-based approach for code quality estimation.
@article{arxiv.2507.05200,
title = {In-Context Learning as an Effective Estimator of Functional Correctness of LLM-Generated Code},
author = {Susmita Das and Madhusudan Ghosh and Priyanka Swami and Debasis Ganguly and Gul Calikli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05200},
year = {2025}
}