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Dr. Boot: Bootstrapping Program Synthesis Language Models to Perform Repairing (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Aug 14, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A training loop has the model write code, run it against tests, and learn from fixing its own broken attempts, like human programmers do. It beat ordinary fine-tuning and matched models 68% larger, though fixing code during use was worse than simply generating more attempts.

Abstract

Language models for program synthesis are usually trained and evaluated on programming competition datasets (MBPP, APPS). However, these datasets are limited in size and quality, while these language models are extremely data hungry. Additionally, the language models have a misaligned program synthesis process compared to humans. While humans iteratively develop code with the help of a compiler, most program synthesis models currently produce code in one go. To solve these issues, we introduce a bootstrapping algorithm for program synthesis, that supports teaching models how to repair. We show that bootstrapping consistently outperforms regular fine-tuning. Compared to other work, our bootstrapped model performs on par with fine-tuned models that are 68\% larger. Notably, bootstrapping with repairing also improves non-repairing performance compared to regular bootstrapping during inference. However, on our models, repairing during inference is likely inferior to simply sampling the same number of solutions. Furthermore, we find that there are issues with the example test cases in the training portion of the APPS dataset that are valuable to the community, as many repairing and reinforcement learning methods rely on them.

Noah van der Vleuten
arXiv:2507.15889 · cs.SE, cs.AI · submitted Jul 20, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Master's thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2023 (https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/search?id=record_54126). Code and experiments available at: https://github.com/NoahVl/Dr-Boot

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