Yongan Yu

Zhengren Wang, Rui Ling, Chufan Wang et al.

Modern code generation has made significant strides in functional correctness and execution efficiency. However, these systems often overlook a critical dimension in real-world software development: maintainability. To handle dynamic requirements with minimal rework, we propose MaintainCoder as a pioneering solution. It integrates the Waterfall model, design patterns, and multi-agent collaboration to systematically enhance cohesion, reduce coupling, achieving clear responsibility boundaries and better maintainability. We also introduce MaintainCoder, a benchmark comprising requirement changes and novel dynamic metrics on maintenance efforts. Experiments demonstrate that existing code generation methods struggle to meet maintainability standards when requirements evolve. In contrast, MaintainCoder improves dynamic maintainability metrics by more than 60% with even higher correctness of initial codes. Furthermore, while static metrics fail to accurately reflect maintainability and even contradict each other, our proposed dynamic metrics exhibit high consistency. Our work not only provides the foundation for maintainable code generation, but also highlights the need for more realistic and comprehensive code generation research. Resources: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/MaintainCoder.

Sizhe Wang, Zhengren Wang, Dongsheng Ma et al.

Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes. We formalize this iterative, multi-turn paradigm as codeflow and introduce CodeFlowBench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' ability to perform codeflow, namely implementing new functionality by reusing existing functions over multiple turns. CodeFlowBench comprises 5,258 problems from Codeforces and is continuously updated via an automated pipeline, which decomposes each problem into subproblems with unit tests based on dependency tree analysis and dataflow analysis. We further propose a novel evaluation framework featured dual assessment protocol and structural metrics derived from dependency trees. Extensive experiments on 16 popular LLMs reveal significant performance degradation in multi-turn scenarios. For instance, o1-mini retains only 20.8% Pass@1 in multi-turn scenario versus 37.8% in single-turn scenario. More fine-grained analysis illustrates that model performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity. These findings not only highlight the critical challenges for supporting real-world workflows, but also establish CodeFlowBench as an essential tool for advancing code generation research.

Yongan Yu, Alexandre Krantz, Nikki G. Lobczowski

Educators have started to turn to Generative AI (GenAI) to help create new course content, but little is known about how they should do so. In this project, we investigated the first steps for optimizing content creation for advanced math. In particular, we looked at the ability of GenAI to produce high-quality practice problems that are relevant to the course content. We conducted two studies to: (1) explore the capabilities of current versions of publicly available GenAI and (2) develop an improved framework to address the limitations we found. Our results showed that GenAI can create math problems at various levels of quality with minimal support, but that providing examples and relevant content results in better quality outputs. This research can help educators decide the ideal way to adopt GenAI in their workflows, to create more effective educational experiences for students.