Skip to content

Author

Tinuade Adeleke

2 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Preprint Jul 2026

When Uncertainty Isn't Enough: An Empirical Study of Self-Correction in Code Generation

Large language models for code generation often produce incorrect solutions without reliable indicators of failure. We study whether uncertainty estimation methods developed for natural language transfer to code generation, and whether such signals can improve code generation via selective self-correction. We evaluate five uncertainty methods: mean token entropy, verbalized confidence, $P(\text{True})$, entropy ensembles, and semantic entropy probes, across three small code LLMs on HumanEval and BigCodeBench. We find that multi-sample $P(\text{True})$ achieves the strongest correlation with correctness, while all the other methods, including semantic entropy probes, yield only weak correlation. We then use these uncertainty signals to drive three self-correction policies: adaptive decoding, uncertainty-based regeneration, and verification-based regeneration. Our results reveal a stronger negative finding than anticipated: uncertainty-based self-correction fails to reliably improve Pass@1, degrading accuracy in 5 of 6 configurations across both benchmarks ($-3$pp to $-10$pp), and adaptive decoding degrades accuracy in 4 of 6 configurations. Only verification-based self-correction reliably improves Pass@1, with gains of $+6$ to $+26$ percentage points on HumanEval and $+8$ to $+20$ percentage points on BigCodeBench, scaling inversely with baseline strength. These findings replicate consistently across both benchmarks and suggest that cheap uncertainty estimators are insufficient on their own to improve code correctness, and that their practical value lies in serving as gating signals for costlier execution-based correction loops rather than as standalone substitutes for verification.

Pranav Rakasi, Maanas Lalwani, Arnav Srivastava et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

The Halt Vector: Internalizing a Causal Steering Intervention for Efficient Reasoning

Reasoning models do not stop when they know the answer. On DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B the chain of thought runs about twice as long as the model's own answer probability takes to settle, and how much of that excess is removable varies from problem to problem, so a global length penalty cannot take it out. We take it out by internalizing a causal interpretability finding into the weights. The mechanism is a halt vector: a difference-of-means direction at layer 18 of this model whose steering strength controls how long it thinks, while a replicated value axis does nothing. Installing that intervention in the weights is harder than it looks. Maximizing the scalar projection onto the direction corrupts the off-axis dimensions a frozen downstream reader depends on, and generation gets longer instead of shorter; what works is reconstructing the whole steered activation with those dimensions pinned to their natural values. Fit from 24 problems and no reinforcement learning, the halt removes about a quarter of the thinking at held accuracy across five unseen benchmarks, and the cut tracks each problem's own removable slack at 0.70. It also closes a non-termination pathology that grows with difficulty and that a decoding-time confidence hook makes worse. We do not claim to beat a well-tuned length penalty or decoding-time early exit on the raw trade-off; the contribution is how the halt is obtained.

Dylan Jayabahu, Tinuade Adeleke · 0 citations