Knowledge-Graph-Driven Data Synthesis for Low-Resource Software Development: A HarmonyOS Case Study
In low-resource framework development (e.g., HarmonyOS), large language models (LLMs) often lack sufficient pre-training exposure, resulting in poor code generation performance. Although they generally preserve programming logic across languages, they frequently fail on framework-specific APIs and syntax, revealing a gap between learned algorithmic knowledge and unfamiliar framework conventions. Consequently, even advanced models such as GPT-4o struggle to produce correct code without prior exposure. Inspired by these challenges, we propose APIKG4SYN, a framework that leverages API knowledge graphs to synthesize API-oriented question–code pairs without requiring executable environments. It incorporates both single-API and multi-API information, with the latter guided by uncertainty estimation (UE) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), to construct high-quality fine-tuning data. For evaluation, we select HarmonyOS as a case study due to its accessible documentation and growing ecosystem, and build the first benchmark for its code generation. Experimental results show that fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Coder-7B with APIKG4SYN achieves a pass@1 of 25.00%, outperforming untuned GPT-4o (17.59%). We further observe that larger volumes of data generated by APIKG4SYN consistently lead to better fine-tuning performance, and that the optimal Single-API to Multi-API ratio is 8:2. Ablation studies also confirm the necessity and effectiveness of each component in our framework. These findings highlight the effectiveness of API-oriented data in enhancing LLM performance for low-resource software development scenarios.
Authors
- Zibin Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7872-7718)
- Zheng Pei (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5757-6607)
- Yanlin Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7761-7269)
- Zirui Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6679-8006)
- Xin Peng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3376-2581)
- Mingwei Liu
- Zihao Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3339-6457)
Institutions
- Sun Yat-sen University (CN)
- Fudan University (CN)
- Zhuhai Institute of Advanced Technology (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.
- Published
- 2026-06-30
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3808133
- Primary Topic
- Software Engineering Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Sun Yat-sen University