Between Spoilers and Guesswork: Avoiding Over-Specification in Coding Benchmarks
Benchmarks drive AI progress, but are hampered by task under-specification and over-specification. Task under-specification causes guesswork, where solutions have to make things up, or worse, resort to contamination or reward hacking. Task over-specification causes spoilers, where solutions can bypass some of the harder steps the benchmark was supposed to measure. Since future-looking benchmarks should be difficult, over-specification reduces a benchmark's shelflife of community adoption. Repository-level coding benchmarks have helped the field progress but experience unnecessary churn due to both over- and under-specification. For instance, SWE-bench Pro, FEA-bench, Doc2Feat-bench, and M...
| Authors | Yuanzhe Liu, Bastian Lipka, Avraham Shinnar et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
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