Learning Task Decomposition to Assist Humans in Competitive Programming

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wen, Jiaxin, Zhong, Ruiqi, Ke, Pei, Shao, Zhihong, Wang, Hongning, Huang, Minlie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wen, Jiaxin
Zhong, Ruiqi
Ke, Pei
Shao, Zhihong
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
author_facet Wen, Jiaxin
Zhong, Ruiqi
Ke, Pei
Shao, Zhihong
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
contents When using language models (LMs) to solve complex problems, humans might struggle to understand the LM-generated solutions and repair the flawed ones. To assist humans in repairing them, we propose to automatically decompose complex solutions into multiple simpler pieces that correspond to specific subtasks. We introduce a novel objective for learning task decomposition, termed assistive value (AssistV), which measures the feasibility and speed for humans to repair the decomposed solution. We collect a dataset of human repair experiences on different decomposed solutions. Utilizing the collected data as in-context examples, we then learn to critique, refine, and rank decomposed solutions to improve AssistV. We validate our method under competitive programming problems: under 177 hours of human study, our method enables non-experts to solve 33.3\% more problems, speeds them up by 3.3x, and empowers them to match unassisted experts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_04604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Task Decomposition to Assist Humans in Competitive Programming
Wen, Jiaxin
Zhong, Ruiqi
Ke, Pei
Shao, Zhihong
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
Computation and Language
Programming Languages
When using language models (LMs) to solve complex problems, humans might struggle to understand the LM-generated solutions and repair the flawed ones. To assist humans in repairing them, we propose to automatically decompose complex solutions into multiple simpler pieces that correspond to specific subtasks. We introduce a novel objective for learning task decomposition, termed assistive value (AssistV), which measures the feasibility and speed for humans to repair the decomposed solution. We collect a dataset of human repair experiences on different decomposed solutions. Utilizing the collected data as in-context examples, we then learn to critique, refine, and rank decomposed solutions to improve AssistV. We validate our method under competitive programming problems: under 177 hours of human study, our method enables non-experts to solve 33.3\% more problems, speeds them up by 3.3x, and empowers them to match unassisted experts.
title Learning Task Decomposition to Assist Humans in Competitive Programming
topic Computation and Language
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04604