Hybrid-Gym: Training Coding Agents to Generalize Across Tasks

When assessing the quality of coding agents, predominant benchmarks focus on solving single issues on GitHub, such as SWE-Bench. In contrast, in real use, these agents solve more various and complex tasks that involve other skills such as exploring codebases, testing software, and designing architecture. In this paper, we first characterize some transferable skills that are shared across diverse tasks by decomposing trajectories into fine-grained components, and derive a set of principles for designing auxiliary training tasks to teach language models these skills. Guided by these principles, we propose a training environment, Hybrid-Gym, consisting of a set of scalable synthetic tasks, such as function localization and dependency search. Experiments show that agents trained on our synthetic tasks effectively generalize to diverse real-world tasks that are not present in training, improving a base model by 25.4% absolute gain on SWE-Bench Verified, 7.9% on SWT-Bench Verified, and 5.1% on Commit-0 Lite. Hybrid-Gym also complements datasets built for the downstream tasks (e.g., improving SWE-Play by 4.9% on SWT-Bench Verified). Code available at: https://github.com/yiqingxyq/Hybrid-Gym.

Hints-In-Browser: Benchmarking Language Models for Programming Feedback Generation

Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by generating individualized feedback and hints for learners. Recent works have primarily focused on improving the quality of generated feedback to achieve human tutors' quality. While quality is an important performance criterion, it is not the only criterion to optimize for real-world educational deployments. In this paper, we benchmark language models for programming feedback generation across several performance criteria, including quality, cost, time, and data privacy. The key idea is to leverage recent advances in the new paradigm of in-browser inference that allow running these models directly in the browser, thereby providing direct benefits across cost and data privacy. To boost the feedback quality of small models compatible with in-browser inference engines, we develop a fine-tuning pipeline based on GPT-4 generated synthetic data. We showcase the efficacy of fine-tuned Llama3-8B and Phi3-3.8B 4-bit quantized models using WebLLM's in-browser inference engine on three different Python programming datasets. We will release the full implementation along with a web app and datasets to facilitate further research on in-browser language models.