arXiv Machine Learning

Syntax Without Semantics: Teaching Large Language Models to Code in an Unseen Language

arXiv:2605. 15607v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve high pass rates on code generation benchmarks, yet whether they can transfer this ability to languages absent from pretraining remains poorly understood.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

Selective Left-Shift: Turning Test-Time Compute and Difficulty-based Curation into Training Data for Low-Resource Code Generation

arXiv:2607. 07748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models achieve strong code generation for high resource languages like Python and Java but suffer sharp performance drops on Low-Resource Programming Languages~(LRPLs) such as Julia.

By Didula Samaraweera, Anjana Supun, Srinath Perera
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Weave of Formal Thought

arXiv:2606. 25987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) attain remarkable surface fluency on code, yet they neither formally guarantee the syntactic validity of their output nor leverage the hierarchical structure defining the target language.

By Alexandre Bouayad
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Evaluating Language Models on Cross-Language Code Functional Equivalence

The paper introduces PolyHuman, a dataset of human-written programs in C++, Java, and Python, to test whether large language models can judge functional equivalence across languages. Using this dataset, the authors evaluate several open-weight and proprietary LLMs, finding that models struggle more with harder problems, show language-specific biases, and rely partly on superficial similarity cues. They also observe run‑to‑run instability in GPT‑o4‑mini, concluding that current LLMs do not reliably capture functional equivalence within or across programming languages.

By Hui Sun, Anderson Uch\^oa, Rohit Gheyi, Wesley K. G. Assun\c{c}\~ao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Agnostics: Learning to Code in Any Programming Language via Reinforcement with a Universal Learning Environment

Agnostics is a language‑agnostic post‑training pipeline that uses reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve large language models on low‑resource programming languages. By rewriting unit‑test datasets into a language‑independent I/O format, providing a short configuration for compiling and running code, and employing a single verifier that judges code by observable behavior, Agnostics eliminates the need for language‑specific engineering. Applied to Lua, Julia, R, OCaml, and Fortran, it boosts Qwen‑3 4B to rival larger models, scales to diverse families, and achieves new state‑of‑the‑art pass@1 on MultiPL‑E and a new multi‑language LiveCodeBench.

By Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki, Yangtian Zi, Zixuan Wu, Tejas Oberoi, Carolyn Jane Anderson, Joydeep Biswas, Arjun Guha
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swap

The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.

By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah