Context Conquers Parameters: Outperforming Proprietary LLM in Commit Message Generation

Abstract: Commit messages provide descriptions of the modifications made in a commit using natural language, making them crucial for software maintenance and evolution. Recent developments in LLMs have led to their use in generating high-quality commit messages, such as the Omniscient Message Generator (OMG). This method employs GPT-4 to produce state-of-the-art commit messages. However, the use of proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 in coding tasks raises privacy and sustainability concerns, which may hinder their industrial adoption. Considering that open-source LLMs have achieved competitive performance in developer tasks such as compiler validation, this study investigates whether they can be used to generate commit messages that are comparable with OMG. Our experiments show that an open-source LLM can generate commit messages that are comparable to those produced by OMG. In addition, through a series of contextual refinements, we propose lOcal MessagE GenerAtor (OMEGA) , a CMG approach that uses a 4-bit quantized 8B open-source LLM. OMEGA produces state-of-the-art commit messages, surpassing the performance of GPT-4 in practitioners' preference.