Verbatim Data Transcription Failures in LLM Code Generation: A State-Tracking Stress Test

Read full text
Authors: Mohd Ariful Haque, Kishor Datta Gupta, Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, Roy George
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Many real-world software tasks require exact transcription of provided data into code, such as cryptographic constants, protocol test vectors, allowlists, and calibration tables. These tasks are operationally sensitive because small omissions or alterations can remain silent while producing syntactically valid programs. This paper introduces a deliberately minimal transcription-to-code benchmark to isolate this reliability concern in LLM-based code generation. Given a list of high-precision decimal constants, a model must generate Python code that embeds the constants verbatim and performs a simple aggregate computation. We describe the prompting variants, evaluation protocol based on exact-string inclusion, and analysis framework used to characterize state-tracking and long-horizon generation failures. The benchmark is intended as a compact stress test that complements existing code-generation evaluations by focusing on data integrity rather than algorithmic reasoning.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Software Testing and Debugging Techniques Software Engineering Research Advanced Malware Detection Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
7 January 2026
Document type
Preprint