AI & ML
Temporal Adaptive Fine-Tuning for Code Comprehension
arXiv cs.SE0 views
arXiv:2610.19970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repository-level code comprehension question answering (QA) supports developer reasoning over functionality and usage distributed across codebases. However, repository-specialized large language models (LLMs) can become misaligned as code evolves. We study this challenge as temporal repository adaptation: acquiring new knowledge, suppressing obsolete, retaining still-valid, and preserving semantically neighboring knowledge. Existing retrieval, fine-tuning, and model-editing methods address only parts of this problem. We propose Temporal Adaptive Fine-Tuning (TAFT), a novel adaptation approach that treats repository transitions as supervision. TAFT derives temporally grounded QA data from repository transitions, pairs newly valid with obsolete knowledge through preference optimization, and replays transition-conditioned retention examples to preserve still-valid knowledge. We evaluate TAFT on an augmented temporal SWE-bench dataset comprising 255,295 QA entries across ten temporal slices, comparing deferred (Baseline), per-slice retrained (Baseline-Batched), and variants with knowledge anchors along four dimensions: updated knowledge, obsolete-answer suppression, retention, and neighbor stability. TAFT consistently outperforms both the deferred and batched baselines, with an average relative improvement of 18% in updated/suppressed knowledge accuracy, doubled retention accuracy, and roughly 1.5 times the neighbor accuracy. With directly supplied knowledge anchors, TAFT-KANT further improves mean updated/suppressed, retention, and neighbor accuracy over TAFT by 3.55%, 8.35%, and 13.00%, respectively. Overall, TAFT demonstrates its effectiveness across all evaluated areas, effectively enabling code comprehension QA alignment with repository evolution.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19970PreviousTaming the Online Software Engineering Tongue: Detecting and Reducing Offensive Language in Software CommunitiesNextLintEval: Benchmarking LLMs on Linter-Guided File Refactoring
Related posts

Always-on Apple Watch display showing the wrong time? Here’s the fix
09to5Mac

Affinity for iPad all-in-one design app now available, free for individuals
09to5Mac

Affinity’s creative studio is now available on iPad for free
0The Verge

SpaceX could buy Boost Mobile as part of its big mobile carrier plans
0The Verge
Northwood Space raises $375M Series C at a $2B valuation from a16z and DFJ growth
0TechCrunch

The Download: the agentic web arrives and the drive for safer roads
0MIT Technology Review