arXiv Computation and Language

perturber: A Stateless Service for Semantics-Preserving Text Perturbations

The paper introduces perturber, a stateless service and Python library designed to apply single, semantics‑preserving text perturbations. It offers a catalog of 68 perturbations across 11 families, enabling reproducible, isolated application of each perturbation without coupling to a specific benchmarking stack. The authors evaluate the tool’s correctness, reproducibility, and cost, and provide a live playground and introspectable catalog for benchmark selection.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Brittlebench: Quantifying LLM robustness via prompt sensitivity

The paper introduces Brittlebench, a framework and evaluation pipeline that measures how sensitive large language models (LLMs) are to prompt variations. By applying semantics‑preserving perturbations to popular benchmarks, the authors show that model performance can drop by up to 12% and that such perturbations can change model rankings in 63% of cases. The study finds that these input variations can explain up to half of the performance variance for a given model, underscoring the importance of robust evaluation methods.

By Angelika Romanou, Mark Ibrahim, Candace Ross, Kerem Oktar, Chantal Shaib, Samuel J. Bell, Anaelia Ovalle, Antoine Bosselut, Jesse Dodge, Koustuv Sinha, Adina Williams
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 7

Turnslide: Scalable Multi-Turn Data Synthesis by Walking a Finite-State Machine

arXiv:2610.07070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models are inexpensive to serve and can run on private infrastructure, but base models are often not good enough at multi-turn tool call...

By Aaron Fainman, Gabriela Kadlecov\'a, Maciej Gryka, Bartosz Kruszczy\'nski, Usman Zafar, C\'edric Archambeau, Aaron Klein, David Salinas, Selim Nowicki, Jacek Golebiowski
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

No Single Tokenizer Feature Reliably Predicts Downstream Language Model Performance

The paper investigates whether intrinsic tokenizer features can predict the performance of downstream language models. By training about 200 models across nine languages and evaluating numerous tokenizer metrics, the authors find that none of the existing metrics consistently forecasts model performance across different families, tasks, and languages. They propose a new linguistically grounded metric that captures aspects of tokenizer quality missed by prior measures, though its predictive power may still vary.

By Antonio Lopardo, Luis Frentzen Salim, Shikhar Srivastava, Kevin Jiang, Mridul Sharma, Catherine Arnett
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Beyond Code Pairs: Dialogue-Based Data Generation for LLM Code Translation

arXiv:2512. 03086v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code translation, yet their performance deteriorates in low-resource programming domains such as Fortran and emerging frameworks like CUDA, where high-quality parallel data are scarce.

By Le Chen, Nuo Xu, Winson Chen, Bin Lei, Pei-Hung Lin, Dunzhi Zhou, Rajeev Thakur, Caiwen Ding, Ali Jannesari, Chunhua Liao
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Predicting Program Exit Code with LLMs and Programming Language Semantics

The paper introduces Program Executability Prediction (PrEx), a task that asks large language models (LLMs) to determine whether a program is semantically valid or invalid and, if invalid, to identify the violated formal rule. To evaluate this, the authors create a dataset of systematically generated invalid programs derived from valid ones and test open‑source coding LLMs across different semantic formalisms, semantic shifts, and program splits (human‑written, LLM‑translated, fuzzer‑generated). Results show that LLMs rely more on pre‑training priors than on the provided semantics, performing poorly on modified semantics and with increasing program complexity.

By Lara Marinov, Aditya Thimmaiah, Jayanth Srinivasa, Junyi Jessy Li, Milos Gligoric
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Can LLMs Reason About Runtime Behavior? A Repository-Level Dynamic Benchmark

The paper introduces SWE-Flux, a repository‑level benchmark designed to test large language models’ ability to reason about runtime behavior. It contains 480 execution‑grounded instances from 12 real Python repositories, with gold answers automatically harvested from instrumented test executions. Evaluation of five LLMs shows the task remains difficult, with the best model achieving only 37% accuracy, and the benchmark can generate challenging variants through input perturbation.

By Hamed Taherkhani, Mohammad Abdollahi, Melika Sepidband, Hridya Dhulipala, Tien N. Nguyen, Hadi Hemmati