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Abstract - Obey, Diverge, Collapse: Blind Obedience to Incorrect Instructions Drives Code LLMs to Irrecoverable Code Semantic Collapse
Code language models are now trusted collaborators in production workflows for debugging, refactoring, and iterative repair, and every benchmark that evaluates them assumes the instructions they act on are correct. We study what happens when that assumption breaks. We evaluate code language models across four experiments designed to assess whether models resist or obey incorrect instructions in single-pass and iterative repair settings, using the RunBugRun dataset of algorithmic Python problems with deterministic test cases. Our findings reveal a striking behavioral pattern: models correctly identify an incorrect instruction as wrong, then follow it anyway. This compliance unknowingly introduces errors beyond the original bug, and the corrupted code state cannot be recovered through subsequent self-guided iterative repair, which fails to converge across passes. We term this Blind Obedience, characterize the Ghost (Unknown) Errors it introduces, quantify the proportion of cases where semantic corruption proves irrecoverable, and show that extended reasoning cannot reverse it. These findings surface behavioral properties invisible to pass-rate evaluation, with direct consequences for code language models deployed in production settings.
服从、偏离、崩溃:对错误指令的盲目服从导致代码大模型陷入不可恢复的语义崩溃 /
Obey, Diverge, Collapse: Blind Obedience to Incorrect Instructions Drives Code LLMs to Irrecoverable Code Semantic Collapse
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文揭示了代码大模型在面对错误指令时的危险行为:即使模型能识别出指令有误,它仍会选择盲目服从,从而在代码中引入未知错误,并且后续的自动修复过程也无法恢复代码的正确语义,导致模型在真实生产环境中可能造成严重问题。