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.
By Mehmet Iscan
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.
By Yuvraj Verma
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.
By Xiaonan Xu, Wenjing Wu
arXiv:2607. 24604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generate--test--revise loops are common in coding agents, but repetition alone provides no reliability guarantee.
By Xueping Gao, Jianwei Yang, Qiang Yang
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.
By Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
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%.
By Esmail Gumaan