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Dec 8

The Open Source Advantage in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

VoxCPM: Tokenizer-Free TTS for Context-Aware Speech Generation and True-to-Life Voice Cloning

Generative models for speech synthesis face a fundamental trade-off: discrete tokens ensure stability but sacrifice expressivity, while continuous signals retain acoustic richness but suffer from error accumulation due to task entanglement. This challenge has driven the field towards multi-stage pipelines that rely on pre-trained speech tokenizers, but these create a semantic-acoustic divide, limiting holistic and expressive speech generation. We resolve these dilemma through hierarchical semantic-acoustic modeling with semi-discrete residual representations and present a novel tokenizer-free TTS model VoxCPM. Our framework introduces a differentiable quantization bottleneck that induces natural specialization: a Text-Semantic Language Model (TSLM) generates semantic-prosodic plans, while a Residual Acoustic Model (RALM) recovers fine-grained acoustic details. This hierarchical semantic-acoustic representation guides a local diffusion-based decoder to generate high-fidelity speech latents. Critically, the entire architecture is trained end-to-end under a simple diffusion objective, eliminating dependency on external speech tokenizers. Trained on a massive 1.8 million hours of bilingual corpus, our VoxCPM-0.5B model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS performance among open-source systems, demonstrating that our approach delivers expressive and stable synthesis. Besides, VoxCPM shows the capability to comprehend text to infer and generate appropriate prosody and style, delivering speech with context-aware expressiveness and natural flow. To facilitate community-driven research and development, VoxCPM is publicly accessible under Apache 2.0.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 29

Qwen3 Technical Report

In this work, we present Qwen3, the latest version of the Qwen model family. Qwen3 comprises a series of large language models (LLMs) designed to advance performance, efficiency, and multilingual capabilities. The Qwen3 series includes models of both dense and Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) architectures, with parameter scales ranging from 0.6 to 235 billion. A key innovation in Qwen3 is the integration of thinking mode (for complex, multi-step reasoning) and non-thinking mode (for rapid, context-driven responses) into a unified framework. This eliminates the need to switch between different models--such as chat-optimized models (e.g., GPT-4o) and dedicated reasoning models (e.g., QwQ-32B)--and enables dynamic mode switching based on user queries or chat templates. Meanwhile, Qwen3 introduces a thinking budget mechanism, allowing users to allocate computational resources adaptively during inference, thereby balancing latency and performance based on task complexity. Moreover, by leveraging the knowledge from the flagship models, we significantly reduce the computational resources required to build smaller-scale models, while ensuring their highly competitive performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Qwen3 achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks, including tasks in code generation, mathematical reasoning, agent tasks, etc., competitive against larger MoE models and proprietary models. Compared to its predecessor Qwen2.5, Qwen3 expands multilingual support from 29 to 119 languages and dialects, enhancing global accessibility through improved cross-lingual understanding and generation capabilities. To facilitate reproducibility and community-driven research and development, all Qwen3 models are publicly accessible under Apache 2.0.

Qwen Qwen
·
May 14 11

Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models

In this work, we introduce the Qwen3 Embedding series, a significant advancement over its predecessor, the GTE-Qwen series, in text embedding and reranking capabilities, built upon the Qwen3 foundation models. Leveraging the Qwen3 LLMs' robust capabilities in multilingual text understanding and generation, our innovative multi-stage training pipeline combines large-scale unsupervised pre-training with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality datasets. Effective model merging strategies further ensure the robustness and adaptability of the Qwen3 Embedding series. During the training process, the Qwen3 LLMs serve not only as backbone models but also play a crucial role in synthesizing high-quality, rich, and diverse training data across multiple domains and languages, thus enhancing the training pipeline. The Qwen3 Embedding series offers a spectrum of model sizes (0.6B, 4B, 8B) for both embedding and reranking tasks, addressing diverse deployment scenarios where users can optimize for either efficiency or effectiveness. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the Qwen3 Embedding series achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks. Notably, it excels on the multilingual evaluation benchmark MTEB for text embedding, as well as in various retrieval tasks, including code retrieval, cross-lingual retrieval and multilingual retrieval. To facilitate reproducibility and promote community-driven research and development, the Qwen3 Embedding models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Findings of the Second BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora

The BabyLM Challenge is a community effort to close the data-efficiency gap between human and computational language learners. Participants compete to optimize language model training on a fixed language data budget of 100 million words or less. This year, we released improved text corpora, as well as a vision-and-language corpus to facilitate research into cognitively plausible vision language models. Submissions were compared on evaluation tasks targeting grammatical ability, (visual) question answering, pragmatic abilities, and grounding, among other abilities. Participants could submit to a 10M-word text-only track, a 100M-word text-only track, and/or a 100M-word and image multimodal track. From 31 submissions employing diverse methods, a hybrid causal-masked language model architecture outperformed other approaches. No submissions outperformed the baselines in the multimodal track. In follow-up analyses, we found a strong relationship between training FLOPs and average performance across tasks, and that the best-performing submissions proposed changes to the training data, training objective, and model architecture. This year's BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still significant room for innovation in this setting, in particular for image-text modeling, but community-driven research can yield actionable insights about effective strategies for small-scale language modeling.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024

The EpiBench Platform to Propel AI/ML-based Epidemic Forecasting: A Prototype Demonstration Reaching Human Expert-level Performance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant effort has gone into developing ML-driven epidemic forecasting techniques. However, benchmarks do not exist to claim if a new AI/ML technique is better than the existing ones. The "covid-forecast-hub" is a collection of more than 30 teams, including us, that submit their forecasts weekly to the CDC. It is not possible to declare whether one method is better than the other using those forecasts because each team's submission may correspond to different techniques over the period and involve human interventions as the teams are continuously changing/tuning their approach. Such forecasts may be considered "human-expert" forecasts and do not qualify as AI/ML approaches, although they can be used as an indicator of human expert performance. We are interested in supporting AI/ML research in epidemic forecasting which can lead to scalable forecasting without human intervention. Which modeling technique, learning strategy, and data pre-processing technique work well for epidemic forecasting is still an open problem. To help advance the state-of-the-art AI/ML applied to epidemiology, a benchmark with a collection of performance points is needed and the current "state-of-the-art" techniques need to be identified. We propose EpiBench a platform consisting of community-driven benchmarks for AI/ML applied to epidemic forecasting to standardize the challenge with a uniform evaluation protocol. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of EpiBench which is currently running and accepting submissions for the task of forecasting COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US states and We demonstrate that we can utilize the prototype to develop an ensemble relying on fully automated epidemic forecasts (no human intervention) that reaches human-expert level ensemble currently being used by the CDC.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2021

Model Breadcrumbs: Scaling Multi-Task Model Merging with Sparse Masks

The rapid development of AI systems has been greatly influenced by the emergence of foundation models. A common approach for targeted problems involves fine-tuning these pre-trained foundation models for specific target tasks, resulting in a rapid spread of models fine-tuned across a diverse array of tasks. This work focuses on the problem of merging multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model derived from a spectrum of auxiliary tasks. We introduce a new simple method, Model Breadcrumbs, which consists of a sparsely defined set of weights that carve out a trajectory within the weight space of a pre-trained model, enhancing task performance when traversed. These breadcrumbs are constructed by subtracting the weights from a pre-trained model before and after fine-tuning, followed by a sparsification process that eliminates weight outliers and negligible perturbations. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Model Breadcrumbs to simultaneously improve performance across multiple tasks. This contribution aligns with the evolving paradigm of updatable machine learning, reminiscent of the collaborative principles underlying open-source software development, fostering a community-driven effort to reliably update machine learning models. Our method is shown to be more efficient and unlike previous proposals does not require hyperparameter tuning for each new task added. Through extensive experimentation involving various models, tasks, and modalities we establish that integrating Model Breadcrumbs offers a simple, efficient, and highly effective approach for constructing multi-task models and facilitating updates to foundation models.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

BMFM-RNA: An Open Framework for Building and Evaluating Transcriptomic Foundation Models

Transcriptomic foundation models (TFMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for analyzing gene expression in cells and tissues, supporting key tasks such as cell-type annotation, batch correction, and perturbation prediction. However, the diversity of model implementations and training strategies across recent TFMs, though promising, makes it challenging to isolate the contribution of individual design choices or evaluate their potential synergies. This hinders the field's ability to converge on best practices and limits the reproducibility of insights across studies. We present BMFM-RNA, an open-source, modular software package that unifies diverse TFM pretraining and fine-tuning objectives within a single framework. Leveraging this capability, we introduce a novel training objective, whole cell expression decoder (WCED), which captures global expression patterns using an autoencoder-like CLS bottleneck representation. In this paper, we describe the framework, supported input representations, and training objectives. We evaluated four model checkpoints pretrained on CELLxGENE using combinations of masked language modeling (MLM), WCED and multitask learning. Using the benchmarking capabilities of BMFM-RNA, we show that WCED-based models achieve performance that matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches like scGPT across more than a dozen datasets in both zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. BMFM-RNA, available as part of the biomed-multi-omics project ( https://github.com/BiomedSciAI/biomed-multi-omic ), offers a reproducible foundation for systematic benchmarking and community-driven exploration of optimal TFM training strategies, enabling the development of more effective tools to leverage the latest advances in AI for understanding cell biology.

ibm-research IBM Research
·
Jun 17

The AI Community Building the Future? A Quantitative Analysis of Development Activity on Hugging Face Hub

Open source developers have emerged as key actors in the political economy of artificial intelligence (AI), with open model development being recognised as an alternative to closed-source AI development. However, we still have a limited understanding of collaborative practices in open source AI. This paper responds to this gap with a three-part quantitative analysis of development activity on the Hugging Face (HF) Hub, a popular platform for building, sharing, and demonstrating models. First, we find that various types of activity across 348,181 model, 65,761 dataset, and 156,642 space repositories exhibit right-skewed distributions. Activity is extremely imbalanced between repositories; for example, over 70% of models have 0 downloads, while 1% account for 99% of downloads. Second, we analyse a snapshot of the social network structure of collaboration on models, finding that the community has a core-periphery structure, with a core of prolific developers and a majority of isolate developers (89%). Upon removing isolates, collaboration is characterised by high reciprocity regardless of developers' network positions. Third, we examine model adoption through the lens of model usage in spaces, finding that a minority of models, developed by a handful of companies, are widely used on the HF Hub. Overall, we find that various types of activity on the HF Hub are characterised by Pareto distributions, congruent with prior observations about OSS development patterns on platforms like GitHub. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings and recommendations for (open source) AI researchers, developers, and policymakers.

  • 3 authors
·
May 20, 2024 1

torchdistill: A Modular, Configuration-Driven Framework for Knowledge Distillation

While knowledge distillation (transfer) has been attracting attentions from the research community, the recent development in the fields has heightened the need for reproducible studies and highly generalized frameworks to lower barriers to such high-quality, reproducible deep learning research. Several researchers voluntarily published frameworks used in their knowledge distillation studies to help other interested researchers reproduce their original work. Such frameworks, however, are usually neither well generalized nor maintained, thus researchers are still required to write a lot of code to refactor/build on the frameworks for introducing new methods, models, datasets and designing experiments. In this paper, we present our developed open-source framework built on PyTorch and dedicated for knowledge distillation studies. The framework is designed to enable users to design experiments by declarative PyYAML configuration files, and helps researchers complete the recently proposed ML Code Completeness Checklist. Using the developed framework, we demonstrate its various efficient training strategies, and implement a variety of knowledge distillation methods. We also reproduce some of their original experimental results on the ImageNet and COCO datasets presented at major machine learning conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR and ECCV, including recent state-of-the-art methods. All the source code, configurations, log files and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill .

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 25, 2020

Enhancing Large Language Models for Secure Code Generation: A Dataset-driven Study on Vulnerability Mitigation

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advancements to code generation, benefiting both novice and experienced developers. However, their training using unsanitized data from open-source repositories, like GitHub, introduces the risk of inadvertently propagating security vulnerabilities. To effectively mitigate this concern, this paper presents a comprehensive study focused on evaluating and enhancing code LLMs from a software security perspective. We introduce SecuCoGenSecuCoGen has been uploaded as supplemental material and will be made publicly available after publication., a meticulously curated dataset targeting 21 critical vulnerability types. SecuCoGen comprises 180 samples and serves as the foundation for conducting experiments on three crucial code-related tasks: code generation, code repair and vulnerability classification, with a strong emphasis on security. Our experimental results reveal that existing models often overlook security concerns during code generation, leading to the generation of vulnerable code. To address this, we propose effective approaches to mitigate the security vulnerabilities and enhance the overall robustness of code generated by LLMs. Moreover, our study identifies weaknesses in existing models' ability to repair vulnerable code, even when provided with vulnerability information. Additionally, certain vulnerability types pose challenges for the models, hindering their performance in vulnerability classification. Based on these findings, we believe our study will have a positive impact on the software engineering community, inspiring the development of improved methods for training and utilizing LLMs, thereby leading to safer and more trustworthy model deployment.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

No Language Data Left Behind: A Comparative Study of CJK Language Datasets in the Hugging Face Ecosystem

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have underscored the crucial role of high-quality datasets in building large language models (LLMs). However, while extensive resources and analyses exist for English, the landscape for East Asian languages - particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) - remains fragmented and underexplored, despite these languages together serving over 1.6 billion speakers. To address this gap, we investigate the HuggingFace ecosystem from a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing on how cultural norms, research environments, and institutional practices shape dataset availability and quality. Drawing on more than 3,300 datasets, we employ quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how these factors drive distinct creation and curation patterns across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean NLP communities. Our findings highlight the large-scale and often institution-driven nature of Chinese datasets, grassroots community-led development in Korean NLP, and an entertainment- and subculture-focused emphasis on Japanese collections. By uncovering these patterns, we reveal practical strategies for enhancing dataset documentation, licensing clarity, and cross-lingual resource sharing - ultimately guiding more effective and culturally attuned LLM development in East Asia. We conclude by discussing best practices for future dataset curation and collaboration, aiming to strengthen resource development across all three languages.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 6

Theme-driven Keyphrase Extraction to Analyze Social Media Discourse

Social media platforms are vital resources for sharing self-reported health experiences, offering rich data on various health topics. Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabling large-scale social media data analysis, a gap remains in applying keyphrase extraction to health-related content. Keyphrase extraction is used to identify salient concepts in social media discourse without being constrained by predefined entity classes. This paper introduces a theme-driven keyphrase extraction framework tailored for social media, a pioneering approach designed to capture clinically relevant keyphrases from user-generated health texts. Themes are defined as broad categories determined by the objectives of the extraction task. We formulate this novel task of theme-driven keyphrase extraction and demonstrate its potential for efficiently mining social media text for the use case of treatment for opioid use disorder. This paper leverages qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting actionable insights from social media data and efficiently extracting keyphrases using minimally supervised NLP models. Our contributions include the development of a novel data collection and curation framework for theme-driven keyphrase extraction and the creation of MOUD-Keyphrase, the first dataset of its kind comprising human-annotated keyphrases from a Reddit community. We also identify the scope of minimally supervised NLP models to extract keyphrases from social media data efficiently. Lastly, we found that a large language model (ChatGPT) outperforms unsupervised keyphrase extraction models, and we evaluate its efficacy in this task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 26, 2023

SWE-Dev: Evaluating and Training Autonomous Feature-Driven Software Development

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capability in diverse software engineering tasks, e.g. code completion, bug fixing, and document generation. However, feature-driven development (FDD), a highly prevalent real-world task that involves developing new functionalities for large, existing codebases, remains underexplored. We therefore introduce SWE-Dev, the first large-scale dataset (with 14,000 training and 500 test samples) designed to evaluate and train autonomous coding systems on real-world feature development tasks. To ensure verifiable and diverse training, SWE-Dev uniquely provides all instances with a runnable environment and its developer-authored executable unit tests. This collection not only provides high-quality data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), but also enables Reinforcement Learning (RL) by delivering accurate reward signals from executable unit tests. Our extensive evaluations on SWE-Dev, covering 17 chatbot LLMs, 10 reasoning models, and 10 Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), reveal that FDD is a profoundly challenging frontier for current AI (e.g., Claude-3.7-Sonnet achieves only 22.45\% Pass@3 on the hard test split). Crucially, we demonstrate that SWE-Dev serves as an effective platform for model improvement: fine-tuning on training set enabled a 7B model comparable to GPT-4o on hard split, underscoring the value of its high-quality training data. Code is available here https://github.com/justLittleWhite/SWE-Dev{https://github.com/justLittleWhite/SWE-Dev}.

  • 9 authors
·
May 22 1

AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development

The landscape of software development has witnessed a paradigm shift with the advent of AI-powered assistants, exemplified by GitHub Copilot. However, existing solutions are not leveraging all the potential capabilities available in an IDE such as building, testing, executing code, git operations, etc. Therefore, they are constrained by their limited capabilities, primarily focusing on suggesting code snippets and file manipulation within a chat-based interface. To fill this gap, we present AutoDev, a fully automated AI-driven software development framework, designed for autonomous planning and execution of intricate software engineering tasks. AutoDev enables users to define complex software engineering objectives, which are assigned to AutoDev's autonomous AI Agents to achieve. These AI agents can perform diverse operations on a codebase, including file editing, retrieval, build processes, execution, testing, and git operations. They also have access to files, compiler output, build and testing logs, static analysis tools, and more. This enables the AI Agents to execute tasks in a fully automated manner with a comprehensive understanding of the contextual information required. Furthermore, AutoDev establishes a secure development environment by confining all operations within Docker containers. This framework incorporates guardrails to ensure user privacy and file security, allowing users to define specific permitted or restricted commands and operations within AutoDev. In our evaluation, we tested AutoDev on the HumanEval dataset, obtaining promising results with 91.5% and 87.8% of Pass@1 for code generation and test generation respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in automating software engineering tasks while maintaining a secure and user-controlled development environment.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

WeDesign: Generative AI-Facilitated Community Consultations for Urban Public Space Design

Community consultations are integral to urban planning processes intended to incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives. However, limited resources, visual and spoken language barriers, and uneven power dynamics frequently constrain inclusive decision-making. This paper examines how generative text-to-image methods, specifically Stable Diffusion XL integrated into a custom platform (WeDesign), may support equitable consultations. A half-day workshop in Montreal involved five focus groups, each consisting of architects, urban designers, AI specialists, and residents from varied demographic groups. Additional data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with six urban planning professionals. Participants indicated that immediate visual outputs facilitated creativity and dialogue, yet noted issues in visualizing specific needs of marginalized groups, such as participants with reduced mobility, accurately depicting local architectural elements, and accommodating bilingual prompts. Participants recommended the development of an open-source platform incorporating in-painting tools, multilingual support, image voting functionalities, and preference indicators. The results indicate that generative AI can broaden participation and enable iterative interactions but requires structured facilitation approaches. The findings contribute to discussions on generative AI's role and limitations in participatory urban design.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 13

Communicative Agents for Software Development

Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 15, 2023 1

CodeWiki: Evaluating AI's Ability to Generate Holistic Documentation for Large-Scale Codebases

Given a large and evolving codebase, the ability to automatically generate holistic, architecture-aware documentation that captures not only individual functions but also cross-file, cross-module, and system-level interactions remains an open challenge. Comprehensive documentation is essential for long-term software maintenance and collaboration, yet current automated approaches still fail to model the rich semantic dependencies and architectural structures that define real-world software systems. We present CodeWiki, a unified framework for automated repository-level documentation across seven programming languages. CodeWiki introduces three key innovations: (i) hierarchical decomposition that preserves architectural context across multiple levels of granularity, (ii) recursive multi-agent processing with dynamic task delegation for scalable generation, and (iii) multi-modal synthesis that integrates textual descriptions with visual artifacts such as architecture diagrams and data-flow representations. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce CodeWikiBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring multi-dimensional rubrics and LLM-based assessment protocols. Experimental results show that CodeWiki achieves a 68.79\% quality score with proprietary models, outperforming the closed-source DeepWiki baseline (64.06\%) by 4.73\%, with particularly strong improvements on high-level scripting languages (+10.47\%). We open-source CodeWiki to foster future research and community adoption.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 28

A Survey of Vibe Coding with Large Language Models

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from code generation assistance to autonomous coding agents, enabling a novel development methodology termed "Vibe Coding" where developers validate AI-generated implementations through outcome observation rather than line-by-line code comprehension. Despite its transformative potential, the effectiveness of this emergent paradigm remains under-explored, with empirical evidence revealing unexpected productivity losses and fundamental challenges in human-AI collaboration. To address this gap, this survey provides the first comprehensive and systematic review of Vibe Coding with large language models, establishing both theoretical foundations and practical frameworks for this transformative development approach. Drawing from systematic analysis of over 1000 research papers, we survey the entire vibe coding ecosystem, examining critical infrastructure components including LLMs for coding, LLM-based coding agent, development environment of coding agent, and feedback mechanisms. We first introduce Vibe Coding as a formal discipline by formalizing it through a Constrained Markov Decision Process that captures the dynamic triadic relationship among human developers, software projects, and coding agents. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we then synthesize existing practices into five distinct development models: Unconstrained Automation, Iterative Conversational Collaboration, Planning-Driven, Test-Driven, and Context-Enhanced Models, thus providing the first comprehensive taxonomy in this domain. Critically, our analysis reveals that successful Vibe Coding depends not merely on agent capabilities but on systematic context engineering, well-established development environments, and human-agent collaborative development models.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 14 3

TENET: Leveraging Tests Beyond Validation for Code Generation

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted software engineering practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside code implementation, ensuring that software behavior is continuously validated and refined. In the era of vibe coding, where developers increasingly delegate code writing to large language models (LLMs) by specifying high-level intentions, TDD becomes even more crucial, as test cases serve as executable specifications that explicitly define and verify intended functionality beyond what natural-language descriptions and code context can convey. While vibe coding under TDD is promising, there are three main challenges: (1) selecting a small yet effective test suite to improve the generation accuracy and control the execution workload, (2) retrieving context such as relevant code effectively, and (3) systematically using test feedback for effective code refinement. To address these challenges, we introduce TENET, an LLM agent for generating functions in complex real-world repositories under the TDD setting. TENET features three components: (1) a novel test harness mechanism that selects a concise test suite to maximize diversity of target usage scenarios; (2) a tailored agent toolset that performs efficient retrieval of relevant code with interactive debugging; and (3) a reflection-based refinement workflow that iteratively analyzes failures, replenishes context, and applies code refinement. TENET achieves 69.08% and 81.77% Pass@1 on RepoCod and RepoEval benchmarks, outperforming the best agentic baselines by 9.49 and 2.17 percentage points, respectively. In addition, this is the first study of test-driven code generation with repository-level context, examining how different aspects of test suites affect the performance of LLM agents under the TDD setting.

Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with complex tasks. In real-world software development, humans usually tackle complex tasks through collaborative teamwork, a strategy that significantly controls development complexity and enhances software quality. Inspired by this, we present a self-collaboration framework for code generation employing LLMs, exemplified by ChatGPT. Specifically, through role instructions, 1) Multiple LLMs act as distinct ``experts'', each responsible for a specific subtask within a complex task; 2) Specify the way to collaborate and interact, so that different roles form a virtual team to facilitate each other's work, ultimately the virtual team addresses code generation tasks collaboratively without the need for human intervention. To effectively organize and manage this virtual team, we incorporate software-development methodology into the framework. Thus, we assemble an elementary team consisting of three ChatGPT roles (i.e., analyst, coder, and tester) responsible for software development's analysis, coding, and testing stages. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various code-generation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that self-collaboration code generation relatively improves 29.9%-47.1% Pass@1 compared to direct code generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance and even surpassing GPT-4. Moreover, we showcase that self-collaboration could potentially enable LLMs to efficiently handle complex real-world tasks that are not readily solved by direct code generation, as evidenced in case study.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2023

The Responsible Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: A Review of Tools & Resources

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

  • 23 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

Enhancing Large Language Models for Text-to-Testcase Generation

Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is a widely employed software development practice that involves developing test cases based on requirements prior to writing the code. Although various methods for automated test case generation have been proposed, they are not specifically tailored for TDD, where requirements instead of code serve as input. Objective: In this paper, we introduce a text-to-testcase generation approach based on a large language model (GPT-3.5) that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompt design. Method: Our approach involves enhancing the capabilities of basic GPT-3.5 for text-to-testcase generation task that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompting design. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach using a span of five large-scale open-source software projects. Results: Our approach generated 7k test cases for open source projects, achieving 78.5% syntactic correctness, 67.09% requirement alignment, and 61.7% code coverage, which substantially outperforms all other LLMs (basic GPT-3.5, Bloom, and CodeT5). In addition, our ablation study demonstrates the substantial performance improvement of the fine-tuning and prompting components of the GPT-3.5 model. Conclusions: These findings lead us to conclude that fine-tuning and prompting should be considered in the future when building a language model for the text-to-testcase generation task

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

TDD Without Tears: Towards Test Case Generation from Requirements through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Test-driven development (TDD) is a widely-employed software development practice that mandates writing test cases based on requirements before writing the actual code. While writing test cases is the centerpiece of TDD, it is time-consuming, expensive, and often shunned by developers. To address these issues associated with TDD, automated test case generation approaches have recently been investigated. Such approaches take source code as input, but not the requirements. Therefore, existing work does not fully support true TDD, as actual code is required to generate test cases. In addition, current deep learning-based test case generation approaches are trained with one learning objective, i.e., to generate test cases that are exactly matched with the ground-truth test cases. However, such approaches may limit the model's ability to generate different yet correct test cases. In this paper, we introduce PyTester, a Text-to-Testcase generation approach that can automatically generate syntactically correct, executable, complete, and effective test cases while being aligned with a given natural language requirement. We evaluate PyTester on the public APPS benchmark dataset, and the results show that our Deep RL approach enables PyTester, a small language model, to outperform much larger language models like GPT3.5, StarCoder, and InCoder. Our findings suggest that future research could consider improving small over large LMs for better resource efficiency by integrating the SE domain knowledge into the design of reinforcement learning architecture.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 15, 2024

Towards Human-Guided, Data-Centric LLM Co-Pilots

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionize various domains, but its adoption is often hindered by the disconnect between the needs of domain experts and translating these needs into robust and valid ML tools. Despite recent advances in LLM-based co-pilots to democratize ML for non-technical domain experts, these systems remain predominantly focused on model-centric aspects while overlooking critical data-centric challenges. This limitation is problematic in complex real-world settings where raw data often contains complex issues, such as missing values, label noise, and domain-specific nuances requiring tailored handling. To address this we introduce CliMB-DC, a human-guided, data-centric framework for LLM co-pilots that combines advanced data-centric tools with LLM-driven reasoning to enable robust, context-aware data processing. At its core, CliMB-DC introduces a novel, multi-agent reasoning system that combines a strategic coordinator for dynamic planning and adaptation with a specialized worker agent for precise execution. Domain expertise is then systematically incorporated to guide the reasoning process using a human-in-the-loop approach. To guide development, we formalize a taxonomy of key data-centric challenges that co-pilots must address. Thereafter, to address the dimensions of the taxonomy, we integrate state-of-the-art data-centric tools into an extensible, open-source architecture, facilitating the addition of new tools from the research community. Empirically, using real-world healthcare datasets we demonstrate CliMB-DC's ability to transform uncurated datasets into ML-ready formats, significantly outperforming existing co-pilot baselines for handling data-centric challenges. CliMB-DC promises to empower domain experts from diverse domains -- healthcare, finance, social sciences and more -- to actively participate in driving real-world impact using ML.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 17

CodeClash: Benchmarking Goal-Oriented Software Engineering

Current benchmarks for coding evaluate language models (LMs) on concrete, well-specified tasks such as fixing specific bugs or writing targeted tests. However, human programmers do not spend all day incessantly addressing isolated tasks. Instead, real-world software development is grounded in the pursuit of high-level goals, like improving user retention or reducing costs. Evaluating whether LMs can also iteratively develop code to better accomplish open-ended objectives without any explicit guidance remains an open challenge. To address this, we introduce CodeClash, a benchmark where LMs compete in multi-round tournaments to build the best codebase for achieving a competitive objective. Each round proceeds in two phases: agents edit their code, then their codebases compete head-to-head in a code arena that determines winners based on objectives like score maximization, resource acquisition, or survival. Whether it's writing notes, scrutinizing documentation, analyzing competition logs, or creating test suites, models must decide for themselves how to improve their codebases both absolutely and against their opponents. We run 1680 tournaments (25,200 rounds total) to evaluate 8 LMs across 6 arenas. Our results reveal that while models exhibit diverse development styles, they share fundamental limitations in strategic reasoning. Models also struggle with long-term codebase maintenance, as repositories become progressively messy and redundant. These limitations are stark: top models lose every round against expert human programmers. We open-source CodeClash to advance the study of autonomous, goal-oriented code development.

stanfordnlp Stanford NLP
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Nov 2 1

Multi-Agent Software Development through Cross-Team Collaboration

The latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), eg., ChatDev, have catalyzed profound transformations, particularly through multi-agent collaboration for software development. LLM agents can collaborate in teams like humans, and follow the waterfall model to sequentially work on requirements analysis, development, review, testing, and other phases to perform autonomous software generation. However, for an agent team, each phase in a single development process yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently, this may lead to obtaining suboptimal results. To address this challenge, we introduce Cross-Team Collaboration (CTC), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various decisions and communicate with their insights in a cross-team collaboration environment for superior content generation. Experimental results in software development reveal a notable increase in quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring the efficacy of our framework. The significant improvements in story generation demonstrate the promising generalization ability of our framework across various domains. We anticipate that our work will guide LLM agents towards a cross-team paradigm and contribute to their significant growth in but not limited to software development. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap

Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex, goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision, outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 7 2

Lyra: A Benchmark for Turducken-Style Code Generation

Recently, neural techniques have been used to generate source code automatically. While promising for declarative languages, these approaches achieve much poorer performance on datasets for imperative languages. Since a declarative language is typically embedded in an imperative language (i.e., the turducken-style programming) in real-world software development, the promising results on declarative languages can hardly lead to significant reduction of manual software development efforts. In this paper, we define a new code generation task: given a natural language comment, this task aims to generate a program in a base imperative language with an embedded declarative language. To our knowledge, this is the first turducken-style code generation task. For this task, we present Lyra: a dataset in Python with embedded SQL. This dataset contains 2,000 carefully annotated database manipulation programs from real-world projects. Each program is paired with both a Chinese comment and an English comment. In our experiment, we adopted Transformer, BERT-style, and GPT-style models as baselines. In the best setting, the generation performance of GPT-style models is better than others, where the AST exact matching accuracy is 24% and 25.5% when using Chinese and English comments, respectively. Therefore, we believe that Lyra provides a new challenge for code generation. Yet, overcoming this challenge may significantly boost the applicability of code generation techniques for real-world software development.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 27, 2021

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI

This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.

  • 3 authors
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May 25 2

You Don't Know Until You Click:Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.

  • 14 authors
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Aug 17

Thinking Longer, Not Larger: Enhancing Software Engineering Agents via Scaling Test-Time Compute

Recent advancements in software engineering agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating program improvements. However, their reliance on closed-source or resource-intensive models introduces significant deployment challenges in private environments, prompting a critical question: How can personally deployable open-source LLMs achieve comparable code reasoning performance? To this end, we propose a unified Test-Time Compute scaling framework that leverages increased inference-time computation instead of larger models. Our framework incorporates two complementary strategies: internal TTC and external TTC. Internally, we introduce a development-contextualized trajectory synthesis method leveraging real-world software repositories to bootstrap multi-stage reasoning processes, such as fault localization and patch generation. We further enhance trajectory quality through rejection sampling, rigorously evaluating trajectories along accuracy and complexity. Externally, we propose a novel development-process-based search strategy guided by reward models and execution verification. This approach enables targeted computational allocation at critical development decision points, overcoming limitations of existing "end-point only" verification methods. Evaluations on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate our 32B model achieves a 46\% issue resolution rate, surpassing significantly larger models such as DeepSeek R1 671B and OpenAI o1. Additionally, we provide the empirical validation of the test-time scaling phenomenon within SWE agents, revealing that models dynamically allocate more tokens to increasingly challenging problems, effectively enhancing reasoning capabilities. We publicly release all training data, models, and code to facilitate future research. https://github.com/yingweima2022/SWE-Reasoner

  • 8 authors
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Mar 31