11 papers
From Conversation to Contribution: Characterizing Coding Agent in Open-Source Software
Zihan Fang, Yueke Zhang, Ningzhi Tang +3
AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have evolved from code-suggestion tools into conversational collaborators, enabling vibe-coding workflows in which developers…
EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention
Yifan Zhang, Chen Huang, Yueke Zhang +5
Code Language Models (CodeLLMs) learn token importance from data correlations, whereas human developers attend selectively to semantically salient code. We present EyeMulator, a mo…
How Coding Agents Fail Their Users: A Large-Scale Analysis of Developer-Agent Misalignment in 20,574 Real-World Sessions
Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Gelei Xu +5
AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually ex…
Focal Reward: Balanced Reinforcement Learning under Rubric-Based Rewards
Yu Huang, Zihua Zhao, Zhaoxin Huan +9
The open-ended generation in LLMs usually requires multi-dimensional rubrics to adequately assess quality and guide the improvement of reinforcement learning. However, a critical d…
NaturalEdit: Code Modification through Direct Interaction with Adaptive Natural Language Representation
Ningzhi Tang, David Meininger, Gelei Xu +4
Code modification requires developers to comprehend code, plan changes, articulate intent, and validate outcomes, making it cognitively demanding. While natural language (NL) code…
Programming by Chat: A Large-Scale Behavioral Analysis of 11,579 Real-World AI-Assisted IDE Sessions
Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Zihan Fang +6
IDE-integrated AI coding assistants, which operate conversationally within developers' working codebases with access to project context and multi-file editing, are rapidly reshapin…