Rubric Is All You Need: Enhancing LLM-based Code Evaluation With Question-Specific Rubrics

Since the disruption in LLM technology brought about by the release of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, LLMs have shown remarkable promise in programming-related tasks. While code generation remains a popular field of research, code evaluation using LLMs remains a problem with no conclusive solution. In this paper, we focus on LLM-based code evaluation and attempt to fill in the existing gaps. We propose multi-agentic novel approaches using question-specific rubrics tailored to the problem statement, arguing that these perform better for logical assessment than the existing approaches that use question-agnostic rubrics. To address the lack of suitable evaluation datasets, we introduce two datasets: a Data Structures and Algorithms dataset containing 150 student submissions from a popular Data Structures and Algorithms practice website, and an Object Oriented Programming dataset comprising 80 student submissions from undergraduate computer science courses. In addition to using standard metrics (Spearman Correlation, Cohen's Kappa), we additionally propose a new metric called as Leniency, which quantifies evaluation strictness relative to expert assessment. Our comprehensive analysis demonstrates that question-specific rubrics significantly enhance logical assessment of code in educational settings, providing better feedback aligned with instructional goals beyond mere syntactic correctness.

Multi-Agent Inverse Q-Learning from Demonstrations

When reward functions are hand-designed, deep reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from reward misspecification, causing them to learn suboptimal policies in terms of the intended task objectives. In the single-agent case, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) techniques attempt to address this issue by inferring the reward function from expert demonstrations. However, in multi-agent problems, misalignment between the learned and true objectives is exacerbated due to increased environment non-stationarity and variance that scales with multiple agents. As such, in multi-agent general-sum games, multi-agent IRL algorithms have difficulty balancing cooperative and competitive objectives. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Agent Marginal Q-Learning from Demonstrations (MAMQL), a novel sample-efficient framework for multi-agent IRL. For each agent, MAMQL learns a critic marginalized over the other agents' policies, allowing for a well-motivated use of Boltzmann policies in the multi-agent context. We identify a connection between optimal marginalized critics and single-agent soft-Q IRL, allowing us to apply a direct, simple optimization criterion from the single-agent domain. Across our experiments on three different simulated domains, MAMQL significantly outperforms previous multi-agent methods in average reward, sample efficiency, and reward recovery by often more than 2-5x. We make our code available at https://sites.google.com/view/mamql .

ReviewEval: An Evaluation Framework for AI-Generated Reviews

The escalating volume of academic research, coupled with a shortage of qualified reviewers, necessitates innovative approaches to peer review. While large language model (LLMs) offer potential for automating this process, their current limitations include superficial critiques, hallucinations, and a lack of actionable insights. This research addresses these challenges by introducing a comprehensive evaluation framework for AI-generated reviews, that measures alignment with human evaluations, verifies factual accuracy, assesses analytical depth, and identifies actionable insights. We also propose a novel alignment mechanism that tailors LLM-generated reviews to the unique evaluation priorities of individual conferences and journals. To enhance the quality of these reviews, we introduce a self-refinement loop that iteratively optimizes the LLM's review prompts. Our framework establishes standardized metrics for evaluating AI-based review systems, thereby bolstering the reliability of AI-generated reviews in academic research.

DebateBench: A Challenging Long Context Reasoning Benchmark For Large Language Models

We introduce DebateBench, a novel dataset consisting of an extensive collection of transcripts and metadata from some of the world's most prestigious competitive debates. The dataset consists of British Parliamentary debates from prestigious debating tournaments on diverse topics, annotated with detailed speech-level scores and house rankings sourced from official adjudication data. We curate 256 speeches across 32 debates with each debate being over 1 hour long with each input being an average of 32,000 tokens. Designed to capture long-context, large-scale reasoning tasks, DebateBench provides a benchmark for evaluating modern large language models (LLMs) on their ability to engage in argumentation, deliberation, and alignment with human experts. To do well on DebateBench, the LLMs must perform in-context learning to understand the rules and evaluation criteria of the debates, then analyze 8 seven minute long speeches and reason about the arguments presented by all speakers to give the final results. Our preliminary evaluation using GPT o1, GPT-4o, and Claude Haiku, shows that LLMs struggle to perform well on DebateBench, highlighting the need to develop more sophisticated techniques for improving their performance.

System Test Case Design from Requirements Specifications: Insights and Challenges of Using ChatGPT

System testing is essential in any software development project to ensure that the final products meet the requirements. Creating comprehensive test cases for system testing from requirements is often challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the effectiveness of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate test case designs from Software Requirements Specification (SRS) documents. In this study, we collected the SRS documents of five software engineering projects containing functional and non-functional requirements, which were implemented, tested, and delivered by respective developer teams. For generating test case designs, we used ChatGPT-4o Turbo model. We employed prompt-chaining, starting with an initial context-setting prompt, followed by prompts to generate test cases for each use case. We assessed the quality of the generated test case designs through feedback from the same developer teams as mentioned above. Our experiments show that about 87 percent of the generated test cases were valid, with the remaining 13 percent either not applicable or redundant. Notably, 15 percent of the valid test cases were previously not considered by developers in their testing. We also tasked ChatGPT with identifying redundant test cases, which were subsequently validated by the respective developers to identify false positives and to uncover any redundant test cases that may have been missed by the developers themselves. This study highlights the potential of leveraging LLMs for test generation from the Requirements Specification document and also for assisting developers in quickly identifying and addressing redundancies, ultimately improving test suite quality and efficiency of the testing procedure.

mEdIT: Multilingual Text Editing via Instruction Tuning

We introduce mEdIT, a multi-lingual extension to CoEdIT -- the recent state-of-the-art text editing models for writing assistance. mEdIT models are trained by fine-tuning multi-lingual large, pre-trained language models (LLMs) via instruction tuning. They are designed to take instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text in the form of natural language instructions, such as Grammatik korrigieren (German) or Parafrasee la oraci\'on (Spanish). We build mEdIT by curating data from multiple publicly available human-annotated text editing datasets for three text editing tasks (Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), Text Simplification, and Paraphrasing) across diverse languages belonging to six different language families. We detail the design and training of mEdIT models and demonstrate their strong performance on many multi-lingual text editing benchmarks against other multilingual LLMs. We also find that mEdIT generalizes effectively to new languages over multilingual baselines. We publicly release our data, code, and trained models at https://github.com/vipulraheja/medit.

Personalized Text Generation with Fine-Grained Linguistic Control

As the text generation capabilities of large language models become increasingly prominent, recent studies have focused on controlling particular aspects of the generated text to make it more personalized. However, most research on controllable text generation focuses on controlling the content or modeling specific high-level/coarse-grained attributes that reflect authors' writing styles, such as formality, domain, or sentiment. In this paper, we focus on controlling fine-grained attributes spanning multiple linguistic dimensions, such as lexical and syntactic attributes. We introduce a novel benchmark to train generative models and evaluate their ability to generate personalized text based on multiple fine-grained linguistic attributes. We systematically investigate the performance of various large language models on our benchmark and draw insights from the factors that impact their performance. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

"Which LLM should I use?": Evaluating LLMs for tasks performed by Undergraduate Computer Science Students in India

This study evaluates the effectiveness of various large language models (LLMs) in performing tasks common among undergraduate computer science students. Although a number of research studies in the computing education community have explored the possibility of using LLMs for a variety of tasks, there is a lack of comprehensive research comparing different LLMs and evaluating which LLMs are most effective for different tasks. Our research systematically assesses some of the publicly available LLMs such as Google Bard, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot Chat, and Microsoft Copilot across diverse tasks commonly encountered by undergraduate computer science students. These tasks include code generation, explanation, project ideation, content generation, class assignments, and email composition. Evaluation for these tasks was carried out by junior and senior students in computer science, and provides insights into the models' strengths and limitations. This study aims to guide students in selecting suitable LLMs for any specific task and offers valuable insights on how LLMs can be used constructively by students and instructors.

Unit Test Generation using Generative AI : A Comparative Performance Analysis of Autogeneration Tools

Generating unit tests is a crucial task in software development, demanding substantial time and effort from programmers. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) introduces a novel avenue for unit test script generation. This research aims to experimentally investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, specifically exemplified by ChatGPT, for generating unit test scripts for Python programs, and how the generated test cases compare with those generated by an existing unit test generator (Pynguin). For experiments, we consider three types of code units: 1) Procedural scripts, 2) Function-based modular code, and 3) Class-based code. The generated test cases are evaluated based on criteria such as coverage, correctness, and readability. Our results show that ChatGPT's performance is comparable with Pynguin in terms of coverage. At the same time, ChatGPT's ability to generate tests is superior to Pynguin, as the latter is not able to generate test cases for Category 1. We also find that about 39% and 28% of assertions generated by ChatGPT for Category 2 and 3, respectively, were incorrect. Our results also show that there is minimal overlap in missed statements between ChatGPT and Pynguin, thus, suggesting that a combination of both tools may enhance unit test generation performance. Finally, prompt engineering improved ChatGPT's performance, achieving an average 28% coverage improvement in Category 2 and 15% improvement in Category 3 after about 4 iterations.

A Comparative Analysis of Large Language Models for Code Documentation Generation

This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generation of code documentation. Code documentation is an essential part of the software writing process. The paper evaluates models such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Bard, Llama2, and Starchat on various parameters like Accuracy, Completeness, Relevance, Understandability, Readability and Time Taken for different levels of code documentation. Our evaluation employs a checklist-based system to minimize subjectivity, providing a more objective assessment. We find that, barring Starchat, all LLMs consistently outperform the original documentation. Notably, closed-source models GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Bard exhibit superior performance across various parameters compared to open-source/source-available LLMs, namely LLama 2 and StarChat. Considering the time taken for generation, GPT-4 demonstrated the longest duration, followed by Llama2, Bard, with ChatGPT and Starchat having comparable generation times. Additionally, file level documentation had a considerably worse performance across all parameters (except for time taken) as compared to inline and function level documentation.