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Wayne Chi

Publications and source records attributed to Wayne Chi.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Learning from 53.6K Real-World Developer Edits of AI-Generated Code

Imperfections in AI-generated code require that software developers modify the generated code manually, or by re-prompting an AI programming assistant. Manual code edits provide more realistic and granular information on editing behavior than Git commits, which only contain final successful code snippets. Yet, due to a lack of high-quality, realistic code editing data, LLMs are mostly trained on publicly available Git data (e.g., commits). To address this gap, we introduce DECODE (Developer Edits of Code Dataset), a dataset of 53.6K real-world in-IDE code edits of AI-generated code in Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript, sourced from 1K+ developers. First, we demonstrate the utility of DECODE for data analysis, obtaining insights on when, why, and how AI-generated code is edited. We find that most edits occur within the first 15 minutes after accepting an AI completion, resulting in the removal of AI completions in 31% of edit trajectories. Second, we use DECODE to benchmark the ability of LLMs to predict code edits. We find that finetuning on DECODE enables open-source 3B models to perform code edit prediction tasks significantly better than frontier LLMs. We then discuss implications of this work, emphasizing the necessity of developer-centric machine learning approaches for future AI programming assistants.

cs.SE

RECAP: An End-to-End Platform for Capturing, Replaying, and Analyzing AI-Assisted Programming Interactions

Understanding how developers interact with AI coding assistants requires more than chat logs or git histories in isolation; it requires reconstructing the full context: which prompt led to which edit, what the developer tried and discarded, and how their strategy evolved over time. We present RECAP (Replay and Examine Captured AI Programming), an open-source platform that (1) passively records AI chat sessions and fine-grained code edits inside VS Code without disrupting the developer's workflow, (2) merges them into a unified timeline for interactive session replay, and (3) exposes an extensible analysis layer, with example modules for behavioral classification and AI reliance measurement. Deployed in a university software engineering course, RECAP captured 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students across a multi-week project. We demonstrate how the platform's linked data and replay capabilities enable analyses of developer-AI interaction patterns that no single data source could support.

cs.SE

Comparing Developer and LLM Biases in Code Evaluation

As LLMs are increasingly used as judges in code applications, they should be evaluated in realistic interactive settings that capture partial context and ambiguous intent. We present TRACE (Tool for Rubric Analysis in Code Evaluation), a framework that evaluates LLM judges' ability to predict human preferences and automatically extracts rubric items to reveal systematic biases in how humans and models weigh each item. Across three modalities -- chat-based programming, IDE autocompletion, and instructed code editing -- we use TRACE to measure how well LLM judges align with developer preferences. Among 13 different models, the best judges underperform human annotators by 12-23%. TRACE identifies 35 significant sources of misalignment between humans and judges across interaction modalities, the majority of which correspond to existing software engineering code quality criteria. For example, in chat-based coding, judges are biased towards longer code explanations while humans prefer shorter ones. We find significant misalignment on the majority of existing code quality dimensions, showing alignment gaps between LLM judges and human preference in realistic coding applications.

cs.SE

GameDevBench: Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Through Game Development

Despite rapid progress on coding agents, progress on their multimodal counterparts has lagged behind. A key challenge is the scarcity of evaluation testbeds that combine the complexity of software development with the need for deep multimodal understanding. In game development, agents must navigate large, dense codebases while manipulating intrinsically multimodal assets such as shaders, sprites, and animations within a visual game scene. We present GameDevBench, the first benchmark for evaluating agents on game development tasks. GameDevBench consists of 333 tasks derived from web and video tutorials. Tasks require significant multimodal understanding and are complex: the average solution requires over three times the lines of code and file changes compared to prior software development benchmarks. Agents struggle with game development, with the best agent and method solving only 53.8% of tasks. We find a strong correlation between perceived task difficulty and multimodal complexity, with average success rate dropping from 51.4% on gameplay-oriented tasks to 33.0% on 2D graphics tasks. To improve multimodal capability, we introduce two simple image- and video-based feedback mechanisms for agents. Despite their simplicity, these methods consistently improve performance, increasing GPT-5.4's performance from 41.1% to 52.0% when given visual feedback.

cs.AI

EDIT-Bench: Evaluating LLM Abilities to Perform Real-World Instructed Code Edits

Instructed code editing, where LLMs directly modify a developer's existing code based on a user instruction, is becoming a widely used interaction mode in AI coding assistants. However, few benchmarks directly evaluate this capability and current datasets often rely on artificial sources. We introduce EDIT-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM code editing capabilities grounded in real-world usage, i.e., user instructions and code contexts collected in the wild. EDIT-Bench comprises of 540 problems, multiple natural and programming languages, and a diverse set of real-world use cases, ranging from resolving errors to adding features. EDIT-Bench introduces context-dependent problems that require the model to understand code context, highlighted code, and cursor position in addition to the user instruction. We evaluate 40 diverse LLMs and observe that EDIT-Bench is a challenging set of problems where only 1 model scores over 60%. We find that model performance varies across different categories of user instructions. Further, we find that varying levels of contextual information greatly affect task success rate, with performance varying up to 11%, indicating the importance of evaluating with realistic context.

cs.SE

Completion $\neq$ Collaboration: Scaling Collaborative Effort with Agents

Current evaluations of agents remain centered around one-shot task completion, failing to account for the inherently iterative and collaborative nature of many real-world problems, where human goals are often underspecified and evolve. We argue for a shift from building and assessing task completion agents to developing collaborative agents, assessed not only by the quality of their final outputs but by how well they engage with and enhance human effort throughout the problem-solving process. To support this shift, we introduce collaborative effort scaling, a framework that captures how an agent's utility grows with increasing user involvement. Through case studies and simulated evaluations, we show that state-of-the-art agents often underperform in multi-turn, real-world scenarios, revealing a missing ingredient in agent design: the ability to sustain engagement and scaffold user understanding. Collaborative effort scaling offers a lens for diagnosing agent behavior and guiding development toward more effective interactions.

cs.CL

Music Arena: Live Evaluation for Text-to-Music

We present Music Arena, an open platform for scalable human preference evaluation of text-to-music (TTM) models. Soliciting human preferences via listening studies is the gold standard for evaluation in TTM, but these studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to compare, as study protocols may differ across systems. Moreover, human preferences might help researchers align their TTM systems or improve automatic evaluation metrics, but an open and renewable source of preferences does not currently exist. We aim to fill these gaps by offering *live* evaluation for TTM. In Music Arena, real-world users input text prompts of their choosing and compare outputs from two TTM systems, and their preferences are used to compile a leaderboard. While Music Arena follows recent evaluation trends in other AI domains, we also design it with key features tailored to music: an LLM-based routing system to navigate the heterogeneous type signatures of TTM systems, and the collection of *detailed* preferences including listening data and natural language feedback. We also propose a rolling data release policy with user privacy guarantees, providing a renewable source of preference data and increasing platform transparency. Through its standardized evaluation protocol, transparent data access policies, and music-specific features, Music Arena not only addresses key challenges in the TTM ecosystem but also demonstrates how live evaluation can be thoughtfully adapted to unique characteristics of specific AI domains. Music Arena is available at: https://music-arena.org . Preference data is available at: https://huggingface.co/music-arena .

cs.SD

Copilot Arena: A Platform for Code LLM Evaluation in the Wild

Evaluating in-the-wild coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a challenging endeavor with no clear solution. We introduce Copilot Arena, a platform to collect user preferences for code generation through native integration into a developer's working environment. Copilot Arena comprises a novel interface for comparing pairs of model outputs, a sampling strategy optimized to reduce latency, and a prompting scheme to enable code completion functionality. Copilot Arena has served over 4.5 million suggestions from 10 models and collected over 11k pairwise judgements. Our results highlight the importance of model evaluations in integrated settings. We find that model rankings from Copilot Arena differ from those of existing evaluations, which we attribute to the more realistic distribution of data and tasks contained in Copilot Arena. We also identify novel insights into human preferences on code such as an observed consistency in user preference across programming languages yet significant variation in preference due to task category. We open-source Copilot Arena and release data to enable human-centric evaluations and improve understanding of coding assistants.

cs.SE

TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks

We interact with computers on an everyday basis, be it in everyday life or work, and many aspects of work can be done entirely with access to a computer and the Internet. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. But how performant are AI agents at accelerating or even autonomously performing work-related tasks? The answer to this question has important implications both for industry looking to adopt AI into their workflows and for economic policy to understand the effects that adoption of AI may have on the labor market. To measure the progress of these LLM agents' performance on performing real-world professional tasks, in this paper we introduce TheAgentCompany, an extensible benchmark for evaluating AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a digital worker: by browsing the Web, writing code, running programs, and communicating with other coworkers. We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that the most competitive agent can complete 30% of tasks autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents--in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems. We release code, data, environment, and experiments on https://the-agent-company.com.

cs.CL

The Impact of Element Ordering on LM Agent Performance

There has been a surge of interest in language model agents that can navigate virtual environments such as the web or desktop. To navigate such environments, agents benefit from information on the various elements (e.g., buttons, text, or images) present. It remains unclear which element attributes have the greatest impact on agent performance, especially in environments that only provide a graphical representation (i.e., pixels). Here we find that the ordering in which elements are presented to the language model is surprisingly impactful--randomizing element ordering in a webpage degrades agent performance comparably to removing all visible text from an agent's state representation. While a webpage provides a hierarchical ordering of elements, there is no such ordering when parsing elements directly from pixels. Moreover, as tasks become more challenging and models more sophisticated, our experiments suggest that the impact of ordering increases. Finding an effective ordering is non-trivial. We investigate the impact of various element ordering methods in web and desktop environments. We find that dimensionality reduction provides a viable ordering for pixel-only environments. We train a UI element detection model to derive elements from pixels and apply our findings to an agent benchmark--OmniACT--where we only have access to pixels. Our method completes more than two times as many tasks on average relative to the previous state-of-the-art.

cs.LG

Generating Music with a Self-Correcting Non-Chronological Autoregressive Model

We describe a novel approach for generating music using a self-correcting, non-chronological, autoregressive model. We represent music as a sequence of edit events, each of which denotes either the addition or removal of a note---even a note previously generated by the model. During inference, we generate one edit event at a time using direct ancestral sampling. Our approach allows the model to fix previous mistakes such as incorrectly sampled notes and prevent accumulation of errors which autoregressive models are prone to have. Another benefit is a finer, note-by-note control during human and AI collaborative composition. We show through quantitative metrics and human survey evaluation that our approach generates better results than orderless NADE and Gibbs sampling approaches.

eess.AS