arXiv:2606. 31511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In deployment settings where retraining is infeasible, small frozen code models are routinely asked to repair a failed program after seeing their own failing output, usually treated as a retry mechanism.
arXiv:2607. 12962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frozen small code LLMs are deployed locally, yet the information guiding a retry after a failed attempt is still measured without placebo controls in the self-repair literature.
arXiv:2607. 26117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-repair - returning a failed program to the model together with its test output and asking for a correction - is a standard component of code agents, and is almost always evaluated against a baseline that does not retry at all.
arXiv:2606. 16999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frozen small code models ( =45.
arXiv:2607. 28871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a repair agent runs a test and sees it pass, the result is treated as evidence about the reported defect.
The study evaluates whether fault localization improves test‑guided code repair by comparing three approaches—blind whole‑solution resampling, spectrum‑based localized infilling, and random‑span infilling—across multiple large language models and benchmarks. Results show that localization is rarely available (only 9.0% of failing candidates), and when it is, localized infilling performs worse than blind resampling, with only suggestive evidence of a benefit over random spans. The findings suggest that targeted edits may not provide a consistent advantage over broader, untargeted repair attempts in current large‑model settings.
arXiv:2607. 11022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The test suites used as RLVR rewards for code have natural false positives: per-task, persistent, asymmetric errors that accept the same wrong programs every time they appear, unlike the symmetric or resampled noise assumed by existing noise-robustness analyses.
The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.
arXiv:2607. 24604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generate--test--revise loops are common in coding agents, but repetition alone provides no reliability guarantee.
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
arXiv:2608. 02464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents fail mid-episode -- they loop, cascade tool errors, drift off goal, fabricate results, or silently absorb corrupted content -- and the standard remedy, judging every step with a second LLM, costs more than the agent itself.
arXiv:2606. 31630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization.
The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.