CoCoNUT: Structural Code Understanding does not fall out of a tree

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide array of tasks involving both structured and unstructured textual data. Recent results on various benchmarks for code generation, repair, or completion suggest that certain models have programming abilities comparable to or even surpass humans. In this work, we demonstrate that high performance on such benchmarks does not correlate to humans' innate ability to understand structural control flow in code. To this end, we extract solutions from the HumanEval benchmark, which the relevant models perform strongly on, and trace their execution path using function calls sampled from the respective test set. Using this dataset, we investigate the ability of seven state-of-the-art LLMs to match the execution trace and find that, despite their ability to generate semantically identical code, they possess limited ability to trace execution paths, especially for longer traces and specific control structures. We find that even the top-performing model, Gemini, can fully and correctly generate only 47% of HumanEval task traces. Additionally, we introduce a subset for three key structures not contained in HumanEval: Recursion, Parallel Processing, and Object-Oriented Programming, including concepts like Inheritance and Polymorphism. Besides OOP, we show that none of the investigated models achieve an accuracy over 5% on the relevant traces. Aggregating these specialized parts with HumanEval tasks, we present CoCoNUT: Code Control Flow for Navigation Understanding and Testing, which measures a model's ability to trace execution of code upon relevant calls, including advanced structural components. We conclude that current LLMs need significant improvement to enhance code reasoning abilities. We hope our dataset helps researchers bridge this gap.

Unlocking Transparent Alignment Through Enhanced Inverse Constitutional AI for Principle Extraction

Traditional methods for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on implicit principles, limiting interpretability. Constitutional AI (CAI) offers an explicit, rule-based framework for guiding model outputs. Building on this, we refine the Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) algorithm, which extracts constitutions from preference datasets. By improving principle generation, clustering, and embedding processes, our approach enhances the accuracy and generalizability of extracted principles across synthetic and real-world datasets. While in-context alignment yields modest improvements, our results highlight the potential of these principles to foster more transparent and adaptable alignment methods, offering a promising direction for future advancements beyond traditional fine-tuning.