How Much Evidence Should a Coding Agent’s Self-Correction Carry? Adaptive Dirichlet Evidence for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2610.08514v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Execution feedback lets coding agents revise programs and learn from their own corrections. A correction's learning weight should reflect both the transitions supported by its executions and the amount of evidence behind that support. We introduce Effective-Evidence Self-Distillation (EESD), which represents these quantities separately. Normalized execution relevance determines relative transition support and an effective pseudo-count mass; a Dirichlet posterior then produces an uncertainty-penalized weight for KL-anchored correction learning. Under a symmetric prior, changing mass preserves category ordering, and effective mass yields a supervised coefficient bounded by its matched fixed-mass counterpart. Across four model-domain history sweeps, increasing visible observations from one to eight reduces future-outcome NLL by 55.0-59.3%. At eight observations, effective mass achieves lower NLL than fixed mass in all four comparisons. In the primary matched DeepSeek/RunBugRun study, argmax predictions agree on all 3,000 examples, with the largest NLL gain under concentrated relevance. After one correction-learning round, DeepSeek/CodeARC all-tests Pass@1 increases from 15.0% to 20.4%, with a paired 95% source-bootstrap interval of [+2.8, +8.0] percentage points. The twelve-setting downstream evaluation establishes the model-domain scope of this update. These results show how separating evidence support from evidence mass changes probability estimation and correction learning in coding agents.

This article has been indexed from cs.AI updates on arXiv.org

Read the original article: