Abstract:Recent advances in large language models have enabled a new class of agentic data science systems that allow users to complete complex data science workflows through natural language. Although these systems can significantly reduce manual effort, it remains difficult to diagnose their behavior and steer the reasoning process when failures or unexpected outputs occur. We present MUSE, an interactive meta-agent that enhances user understanding and control of agentic data science systems by (1) dynamically restructuring low-level execution traces into multiple semantic levels that support navigation from high-level overviews to low-level implementation details; (2) enabling users to reference specific workflow steps in context to ask grounded questions, provide feedback, and revise problematic steps without manually locating relevant execution history; and (3) supporting mixed-initiative steering by surfacing suspicious steps for inspection, scaffolding the repair process, and translating user repair intent into contextualized instructions for the underlying agent. In a between-subjects study (n = 15), MUSE improved task efficiency and increased users' confidence in understanding and steering agentic data science workflows.
Abstract:Large language models often generate code with bugs. Existing methods rely on feedback signals such as test failures and self-critiques to iteratively refine the generated code. Such signals are either too coarse-grained or too high-level, which is not sufficient to inform the model where to fix the bug. In this work, we present Flare, an iterative framework with a lightweight diagnostic model that predicts line-level suspiciousness signals for bug localization and code refinement. Given the inherent uncertainty of diagnostic predictions, Flare searches over the top-k suspicious regions and selects the best candidate according to execution outcomes. Experiments on LiveCodeBench and BigCodeBench with five base LLMs show that, even without candidate search (k=1), Flare outperforms the strongest baseline with an absolute improvement from 1.72% to 7.42%. Furthermore, searching over 10 candidates yields an average improvement of 8.50% compared with no candidate search. When evaluated in isolation, our lightweight diagnostic model achieves the best performance compared with recent fault localization methods, demonstrating that it can provide reliable fine-grained guidance for code refinement.
Abstract:Existing web agents typically initiate exploration from the root URL, which is inefficient for complex websites with deep hierarchical structures. Without a global view of the website's structure, agents frequently fall into navigation traps, explore irrelevant branches, or fail to reach target information within a limited budget. We propose Mango, a multi-agent web navigation method that leverages the website structure to dynamically determine optimal starting points. We formulate URL selection as a multi-armed bandit problem and employ Thompson Sampling to adaptively allocate the navigation budget across candidate URLs. Furthermore, we introduce an episodic memory component to store navigation history, enabling the agent to learn from previous attempts. Experiments on WebVoyager demonstrate that Mango achieves a success rate of 63.6% when using GPT-5-mini, outperforming the best baseline by 7.3%. Furthermore, on WebWalkerQA, Mango attains a 52.5% success rate, surpassing the best baseline by 26.8%. We also demonstrate the generalizability of Mango using both open-source and closed-source models as backbones. Our data and code are open-source and available at https://github.com/VichyTong/Mango.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in code generation. However, how to reliably evaluate code generated by LLMs remains an unresolved problem. This paper presents CodeJudge, a code evaluation framework that leverages LLMs to evaluate the semantic correctness of generated code without the need for test cases. We investigate different ways to guide the LLM in performing "slow thinking" to arrive at an in-depth and reliable evaluation. We experimented with four LLMs as evaluators on four code generation datasets and five programming languages. The results show that CodeJudge significantly outperformed existing methods in most settings. Furthermore, compared with a SOTA GPT-3.5-based code evaluation method, CodeJudge achieved better results even when using a much smaller model, Llama-3-8B-Instruct. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/VichyTong/CodeJudge.