From Guessing to Placeholding: A Cost-Theoretic Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Code Completion

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Abstract:While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in code completion, they typically adhere to a Hard Completion (HC) paradigm, compelling the generation of fully concrete code even amidst insufficient context. Our analysis of 3 million real-world interactions exposes the limitations of this strategy: 61% of the generated suggestions were either edited after acceptance or rejected despite exhibiting over 80% similarity to the user's subsequent code, suggesting that models frequently make erroneous predictions at specific token positions. Motivated by this observation, we propose Adaptive Placeholder Completion (APC), a collaborative framework that extends HC by strategically outputting explicit placeholders at high-entropy positions, allowing users to fill directly via IDE navigation. Theoretically, we formulate code completion as a cost-minimization problem under uncertainty. Premised on the observation that filling placeholders incurs lower cost than correcting errors, we prove the existence of a critical entropy threshold above which APC achieves strictly lower expected cost than HC. We instantiate this framework by constructing training data from filtered real-world edit logs and design a cost-based reward function for reinforcement learning. Extensive evaluations across 1.5B--14B parameter models demonstrate that APC reduces expected editing costs from 19% to 50% while preserving standard HC performance. Our work provides both a theoretical foundation and a practical training framework for uncertainty-aware code completion, demonstrating that adaptive abstention can be learned end-to-end without sacrificing conventional completion quality.

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

Cite as: arXiv:2604.01849 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2604.01849v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01849

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Liang Zhu [view email] [v1] Thu, 2 Apr 2026 10:03:32 UTC (126 KB)