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arXiv — cs.AI preprintsInternational19 October 2026

Between Spoilers and Guesswork: Avoiding Over-Specification in Coding Benchmarks

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arXiv:2610.22760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 p
— arXiv — cs.AI preprints

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