arXiv AI By Will Badr

Hints Help But Do They Teach? Evaluating Skills Transfer in Code Generation

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The study investigates whether hints that convert failing code generation attempts into passing ones provide new information or simply guide models toward solutions they could already generate. Using Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Phi-3.5-mini on HumanEval+ and MBPP+, the authors find that relevant hints rescue a significant portion of failures, yet many of those solutions are also recoverable through ordinary sampling. Mechanistic tests reveal a shared activation direction between relevant and unrelated hints, but adding this direction does not improve overall accuracy, indicating limited task-general transfer.

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