Rethinking Pivot Programming Languages in Code Language Models
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The paper introduces PolyHuman, a dataset of human-written programs in C++, Java, and Python, to test whether large language models can judge functional equivalence across languages. Using this dataset, the authors evaluate several open-weight and proprietary LLMs, finding that models struggle more with harder problems, show language-specific biases, and rely partly on superficial similarity cues. They also observe run‑to‑run instability in GPT‑o4‑mini, concluding that current LLMs do not reliably capture functional equivalence within or across programming languages.
arXiv:2607. 14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform differently on identical programming tasks when prompted in different natural languages, a phenomenon known as language bias.
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform differently on identical programming tasks when prompted in different natural languages, a phenomenon known as language bias. While this behavior has been widely studied for general text generation, its impact on code generation quality and programming conventions remains largely unexplored.
arXiv:2605. 00754v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward models (RMs) have become an indispensable fixture of the language model (LM) post-training playbook, enabling policy alignment and test-time scaling.
arXiv:2607. 13077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce homogeneous outputs, raising concerns that AI coding assistants may lead to convergence in the software artifacts that developers create.
The paper investigates how token consumption varies across programming languages for coding agents. Five recent models were evaluated on Python, Java, Rust, and OCaml, revealing significant differences in token usage that persist across models. Analysis of agent trajectories shows that agents often generate non‑compiling solutions in unfamiliar languages, revise passing solutions, plan in code comments, distrust provided tests, and prototype in Python to sidestep unfamiliar languages.