Evaluate Multi-Defect Specifications with a Larger, Budget-Matched Study

Conduct a larger, response-budget-matched study of research-method specifications containing multiple interacting implementation-critical defects to determine whether multi-defect specifications make defect localization more difficult.

Background

The benchmark primarily evaluates controlled single-defect instances, with each specification designed to contain one annotated implementation blocker. The paper reports an exploratory ablation in which two known defects are combined into one specification, but this analysis uses only 50 controlled-synthetic pairs and gives the multi-defect condition a response-count advantage. Consequently, the reported finding does not resolve whether multiple interacting defects intrinsically affect localization difficulty. A larger study that matches the response budget across conditions is needed to assess this unresolved question.

References

Our exploratory multi-defect ablation (Appendix~\ref{app:multi_defect_ablation}) finds no evidence that combining two known defects into one specification makes localization harder, but this test uses only 50 controlled-synthetic pairs with a response-count asymmetry between conditions, so a larger, response-budget-matched study of specifications with multiple interacting defects remains open.

— IdeaAMBIG: Benchmarking Implementation-Critical Gaps in Research-Idea Specifications  (2609.10539 - Ma et al., 9 Sep 2026) in Section*{Limitations}