grading-llm-generated-unit-tests-pass-rate-line-coverage-alone
observationsingle paperpending review

When grading LLM-generated unit tests by pass rate and line coverage alone, a share of passing test suites never directly call the function under test — they reach it through wrappers, mocks, or unrelated public APIs — so pass rate overstates test quality, and this gap widens under agentic repository-access workflows and richer file-level context.

Ingested from a paper but not yet reviewed by a human. It is deliberately inert: it does not move any technique’s standing, does not count toward the backtest, and is excluded anywhere a claim would carry weight. Read the source before relying on it.

Capability: Whether the measurement made the finding

Observed on

Repository-level unit test generation for focal functions in Rust, Go, Julia, PHP and Ruby; 14 models including Claude 4.5, GPT-5.2, DeepSeek V4-pro; effect size varies strongly by.

Sources

  • Measured on a 3,642-function benchmark with containerized execution. Reported 9.7% of pass-rate-passing suites failing invocation checks overall, concentrated in Rust (28.3%) and Ruby (19.2%) and near zero in Go/PHP. File-level context on Ruby dropped invocation rate from 85.6% to 53.2% across three models; a headless Claude Code agent on PHP raised pass rate while invocation rate fell to 27.6%. Invocation is computed by AST call-identifier matching, so it can miss indirect-but-intentional invocation and cannot itself judge assertion quality; [truncated]
Status: pending-reviewLast checked: 2026-09-09Evidence activity: not checked yet
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Notes

Drafted from the paper by a model and filed unreviewed. Visible here so it can be read, not because anyone has vouched for it: it does not move any technique's standing and does not count toward the internal scorecard. Drafted confidence: medium. Falsifier as drafted: Show that on the same benchmark, tests scored as passing almost always contain a direct call to the focal function, and that agentic or file-context settings do not lower direct-invocation rates while raising pass rate. Proposed technique, not catalogued: invocation-rate metric for generated tests. Automatic check flagged: figures not in the source: 53.2%.