  This work introduces self-infilling code generation, a general framework that
incorporates infilling operations into auto-regressive decoding. Our approach
capitalizes on the observation that recent infilling-capable code language
models can self-infill: whereas infilling operations aim to fill in the middle
based on a predefined prefix and suffix, self-infilling sequentially generates
both such surrounding context and the infilled content. We utilize this
capability to introduce novel interruption and looping mechanisms in
conventional decoding, evolving it into a non-monotonic process. Interruptions
allow for postponing the generation of specific code until a definitive suffix
is established, enhancing control over the output. Meanwhile, the looping
mechanism, which leverages the complementary nature of self-infilling and
left-to-right decoding, can iteratively update and synchronize each piece of
generation cyclically. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that
our proposed decoding process is effective in enhancing both regularity and
quality across several code generation benchmarks.
