arXiv subjects

Aashish Yadavally

Publications and source records attributed to Aashish Yadavally.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AdaptAgent: A Multi-agent, Domain-Guided Reasoning Framework for Code Adaptation

Developers often need to adapt into their projects the code generated from LLMs or code snippets from online forums. However, integrating them into an existing repository remains challenging in a manual process. A successful integration typically requires more than copying code as a user must produce correct adapting changes at a designated location in the target repository. We formalize this as the code adaptation problem: given a snippet, functional intent, a target repository, and an adaptation location, generate a patch that adapts the snippet into the repository. We present AdaptAgent, a multi-agent, domain-guided reasoning framework for code adaptation. Rather than relying on single-shot prompting, AdaptAgent decomposes adaptation into specialized agents that communicate via typed artifacts: an Intent Summarizer extracts adaptation goals from Q&A text; a Policy Agent derives domain policies from six adaptation categories; a Domain Planner generates a self-ordered plan; a Context Miner distills sibling-method semantics from the target codebase; and a Code Adapter realizes the plan as a minimal unified diff, iteratively refined using a compiler-based Verifier. This division of labor enables robust, policy-aligned adaptations and supports adapting code snippets into a project. On a real-world dataset, AdaptAgent outperforms strong baselines in semantic correctness and produces patches that mirror developers' actual adaptation patterns. Our ablation study shows each agent's necessity, especially planning for code-hardening and exception-handling, and intent for logic customization.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Can Perplexity Serve as a Cognitive Signal for Code Understandability?

Recent work suggests that token-level perplexity from large language models can align with localized human confusion during code comprehension. This raises a natural question: can perplexity also serve as a snippet-level signal for code understandability? We conduct an empirical study of this question across multiple human-grounded datasets, including method-level understandability judgments, output-prediction tasks, and accepted understandability-improvement patches. Despite prior token-level evidence, we find that simple snippet-level aggregations of token perplexity, such as average, median, or peak perplexity, do not reliably correlate with human understandability. We then investigate why this happens. First, token perplexity is highly skewed and heavy-tailed across code structures; extreme spikes arise not only from semantically meaningful constructs, but also from identifiers, literals, types, separators, and tokenization artifacts. Second, human understandability labels often lack consensus, making whole-snippet difficulty a noisy target. Third, perplexity distributions and their alignment with human difficulty vary substantially across models and tokenizers. These findings explain why prior token-level perplexity--confusion alignment does not directly transfer to snippet-level understandability. Overall, our study positions perplexity as a promising but delicate cognitive signal: useful for localized code confusion, but requiring code-aware aggregation, consensus-aware evaluation, and model-sensitivity analysis before it can support reliable code-understandability measurement.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Benchmarking Code Improvement with Progressive, Adaptive, and Interactive Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) are typically evaluated on code generation and program repair using binary functional correctness: a generated program or patch either passes or fails a test suite. This protocol is simple but coarse, as it ignores partial progress, feedback use, regressions, and the refinement trajectory through which models often improve code. We introduce PAIR-Bench, a progressive and adaptive benchmark for evaluating code improvement: transforming an incorrect or incomplete program into a more correct one through feedback-guided refinement. PAIR-Bench uses progressive hinting, a structured feedback protocol with two controls. Failure-region control determines what the feedback targets by grouping hidden failing tests into failure scenarios, while hint-depth control determines how much repair-relevant information is revealed, from coarse symptoms to implementation-level guidance. This design enables PAIR-Bench to measure whether a model repairs targeted failures, generalizes beyond the hint, preserves already-correct behavior, and how much assistance it requires. By evaluating repair trajectories progressive metrics rather than only final pass/fail outcomes, PAIR-Bench provides a finer-grained assessment of LLM code-improvement capability.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

The Path Not Taken: Duality in Reasoning about Program Execution

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse coding tasks. However, their adoption requires a true understanding of program execution rather than relying on surface-level patterns. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on predicting program properties tied to specific inputs (e.g., code coverage, program outputs). As a result, they provide a narrow view of dynamic code reasoning and are prone to data contamination. We argue that understanding program execution requires evaluating its inherent duality through two complementary reasoning tasks: (i) predicting a program's observed behavior for a given input, and (ii) inferring how the input must be mutated toward a specific behavioral objective. Both tasks jointly probe a model's causal understanding of execution flow. We instantiate this duality in DexBench, a benchmark comprising 445 paired instances, and evaluate 13 LLMs. Our results demonstrate that dual-path reasoning provides a robust and discriminative proxy for dynamic code understanding.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Fuzzwise: Intelligent Initial Corpus Generation for Fuzzing

In mutation-based greybox fuzzing, generating high-quality input seeds for the initial corpus is essential for effective fuzzing. Rather than conducting separate phases for generating a large corpus and subsequently minimizing it, we propose FuzzWise which integrates them into one process to generate the optimal initial corpus of seeds (ICS). FuzzWise leverages a multi-agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). The first LLM agent generates test cases for the target program. The second LLM agent, which functions as a predictive code coverage module, assesses whether each generated test case will enhance the overall coverage of the current corpus. The streamlined process allows each newly generated test seed to be immediately evaluated for its contribution to the overall coverage. FuzzWise employs a predictive approach using an LLM and eliminates the need for actual execution, saving computational resources and time, particularly in scenarios where the execution is not desirable or even impossible. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that FuzzWise generates significantly fewer test cases than baseline methods. Despite the lower number of test cases, FuzzWise achieves high code coverage and triggers more runtime errors compared to the baselines. Moreover, it is more time-efficient and coverage-efficient in producing an initial corpus catching more errors.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Model Critics for Execution-Free Evaluation of Code Changes

Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising way forward for automating software engineering tasks, such as bug fixes, feature additions, etc., via multi-step LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing metrics for evaluating such workflows, mainly build status and occasionally log analysis, are too sparse and limited in providing the information needed to assess the quality of changes made. In this work, we designed LLM-based critics to derive well-structured and rigorous intermediate/step-level, execution-free evaluation proxies for repo-level code changes. Importantly, we assume access to the gold test patch for the problem (i.e., reference-aware) to assess both semantics and executability of generated patches. With the gold test patch as a reference, we predict executability of all editing locations with an F1 score of 91.6%, aggregating which, we can predict the build status in 84.8% of the instances in SWE-bench. In particular, such an execution-focused LLM critic outperforms other reference-free and reference-aware LLM critics by 38.9% to 72.5%. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of such a reference-aware framework in comparing patches generated by different agentic workflows. Finally, we open-source the library developed for this project, which allows further usage for either other agentic workflows or other benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/code-agent-eval.

cs.CL↗