Hints Help But Do They Teach? Evaluating Skills Transfer in Code Generation
When a hint turns a failing generated program into a passing one, does it provide missing information or merely steer the model toward a solution it could already produce? We test these hypotheses on HumanEval+ and MBPP+ using executable evaluation. For Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, adaptive relevant hints rescue 36 of 79 selected failures; an unrelated hint rescues 19, while eight unhinted samples solve 46 and recover 31 of the 36 relevant-hint rescues. Phi-3.5-mini shows the same pattern: relevant hints rescue 42 of 101 failures, an unrelated hint rescues 17, and unhinted sampling solves 57, including 36 of the 42 relevant-hint rescues. Because the hint conditions use different attempt budgets, ...
| Authors | Will Badr |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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