Fewer Clarifications, Better Code: Benchmarking Cross-Session Personalized Ambiguity Adaptation in Coding Assistants
The paper introduces a new task called personalized ambiguity adaptation for coding assistants, focusing on resolving recurring user-specific ambiguities across sessions using resolved session history as memory. A benchmark dataset named CAPA is proposed, containing 600 coding sessions with six ambiguity mechanisms injected into unambiguous tasks via a controlled three-stage pipeline. Twelve recent LLMs are evaluated under no-history and same-user-history conditions using metrics like executable
Analysis
TL;DR
- The paper introduces a new task called personalized ambiguity adaptation for coding assistants, focusing on resolving recurring user-specific ambiguities across sessions using resolved session history as memory.
- A benchmark dataset named CAPA is proposed, containing 600 coding sessions with six ambiguity mechanisms injected into unambiguous tasks via a controlled three-stage pipeline.
- Twelve recent LLMs are evaluated under no-history and same-user-history conditions using metrics like executable success and turns-to-completion, revealing significant room for improvement in cross-session ambiguity resolution.
- The authors propose same-user history gating as a lightweight inference-time method to leverage historical context for better ambiguity adaptation without heavy model retraining.
Why It Matters
This work addresses a critical gap in AI-assisted coding: the lack of long-term memory for personalized ambiguity resolution across sessions. By formalizing this as a new task and providing a rigorous benchmark (CAPA), it enables researchers to develop more intuitive, efficient coding assistants that reduce repetitive clarifications and align better with individual user intent over time. The findings highlight current LLM limitations in leveraging historical context, guiding future research toward more adaptive, user-centric coding tools.
Technical Details
- Task Formulation: Personalized ambiguity adaptation requires an assistant to identify recurring ambiguity patterns from a user’s past resolved sessions and produce executable code for a new ambiguous request while minimizing clarification turns.
- Benchmark Design: CAPA injects six ambiguity mechanisms (e.g., vague terms, implicit assumptions) into unambiguous tasks using a three-stage pipeline (task selection → ambiguity injection → validation). It includes 600 sessions across 60 balanced user–ambiguity cells, with 300 held-out evaluation sessions.
- Evaluation Metrics: Models are assessed on executable success rate (code runs correctly), first-turn success (correct solution in initial response), and turns-to-completion (number of clarification rounds needed).
- Model Testing: Twelve recent LLMs were tested under two settings—no-history (isolated session) and same-user-history (access to prior resolved sessions)—to measure the impact of memory-based disambiguation.
- Proposed Method: Same-user history gating selectively incorporates relevant past sessions during inference, improving ambiguity resolution without modifying model weights or requiring full retraining.
Industry Insight
Coding assistant developers should prioritize integrating cross-session memory mechanisms to reduce user friction and improve productivity. The CAPA benchmark offers a standardized way to evaluate and enhance these capabilities, encouraging investment in lightweight, inference-time adaptations like history gating rather than costly model retraining. As AI coding tools mature, personalization through persistent user-specific ambiguity resolution will become a key differentiator for enterprise-grade assistants aiming to deliver seamless, context-aware support.
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.