The paper investigates the problem of over‑editing by large language models (LLMs) when repairing code, showing that even state‑of‑the‑art models like GPT‑5.5 often rewrite more code than necessary. Using a benchmark of 400 BigCodeBench problems with controlled AST‑level corruptions, the authors quantify over‑editing and demonstrate that a simple preservation instruction can significantly reduce excess edits and cognitive complexity while improving Pass@1. They further explore post‑training strategies, finding that reinforcement learning yields the best balance between edit fidelity and performance retention, thereby establishing edit fidelity as a distinct, measurable dimension of code‑repair quality.
Reinforcement learning (RL) from unit tests is the common recipe for post-training code models, but a unit test only asks whether the final program passes. We analyze what this unit-test-only reward t...
arXiv:2511. 05852v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge editing (KE) offers a lightweight alternative to retraining for updating large language models (LLMs).
By Yinjie Cheng, Paul Youssef, Christin Seifert, J\"org Schl\"otterer, Zhixue Zhao
arXiv:2610.18755v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) from unit tests is the common recipe for post-training code models, but a unit test only asks whether the final program p...
By Yunkai Zhan, Miaosen Chai, Shangshang Wang, Jike Zhong, Yuqing Yang, Deqing Fu, Serina Chang, Wang Bill Zhu
arXiv:2610.15894v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) code-repair systems fix faulty programs by repeatedly generating and testing revisions. Each revision is costly, making th...
By Elad Sharony, Ido Greenberg, Jialin Song, Shie Mannor, Gal Chechik, Eli Meirom
The paper introduces the Harmful Memorization Index (HMI) to measure when large language models (LLMs) fail to adapt to small semantic changes in coding tasks, producing code that is superficially similar to the original solution. It proposes an automated code‑rewriting pipeline that generates semantically different variants of tasks by altering core logic elements, and uses HMI to combine similarity metrics with performance degradation. Experiments on MBPP+ and BigCodeBench show that HMI does not simply grow with model size, is higher for certain logic‑edit types, and that supervised fine‑tuning can increase HMI while PPO offers a better accuracy–HMI trade‑off.
By Lizhe Zhang, Wentao Chen, Li Zhong, Letian Peng, Zilong Wang, Jingbo Shang
arXiv:2607. 28887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly write and repair production code, yet evidence is mounting that their test-passing patches leave codebases harder to maintain.
By Amir M. Ebrahimi, Mohammed Mehedi Hasan, Aaditya Bhatia, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Ahmed E. Hassan
The paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) handle bug fixing compared to human-written patches by analyzing about 3,000 Codeforces submissions. It finds that LLMs often modify more lines than necessary and sometimes produce entirely new solutions, and that they solve more problems correctly when generating solutions from scratch rather than patching existing code. The study highlights implications for AI‑assisted programming tools, suggesting a shift toward incremental problem‑solving strategies.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle bug fixing versus problem solving in competitive programming. Using a dataset of ~3,000 Codeforces submissions and their human fixes, the authors compare LLM-generated patches to human patches and assess whether LLMs prefer to modify buggy code or generate new solutions. Results show that LLMs often alter more lines than necessary and sometimes produce entirely new solutions, performing better when allowed to generate solutions from scratch rather than patching existing code.
By Alexandru Stefan Stoica, Traian Rebedea, Marian Cristian Mihaescu
arXiv:2507. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated Program Repair (APR) seeks to automatically correct software bugs without requiring human intervention.
By Marcos Fuster-Pena, David de-Fitero-Dominguez, Antonio Garcia-Cabot, Eva Garcia-Lopez
The paper compares two output regimes for code-editing language models: direct generation, where the model outputs the entire modified file, and iterative diff-based generation, where the model emits a sequence of localized edits. Experiments on Flutter/Dart tasks show that direct generation consistently outperforms diff-based generation across metrics such as compilation success, token efficiency, and quality judgments. However, diff-based generation can be competitive for short, spatially localized edits, particularly in refactoring and error-handling tasks with few edit steps.
By Andrej Andrejev
arXiv:2606. 26783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fang et al.
By Ananth K S, Arya Hariharan