English

Spaghetti Architect: A Contamination-Resistant, By-Construction-Labelled, Multi-Language Code Dataset Generator

Machine Learning 2026-07-21 v1 Software Engineering

Abstract

Mined code corpora are abundant but uncontrolled: a snippet's semantics, surface "messiness," and difficulty are whatever the wild contained; there is no known-optimal reference to grade against; and any public sample may already sit in a model's training set. We present Spaghetti Architect, a tool that mints code datasets with the control such corpora lack. An anti-optimization transpiler maps a clean, language-agnostic JSON intermediate representation to deliberately redundant, fully-flattened programs in five languages (Python, JavaScript, Go, Java, C++); every program is compiled, run, and checked against a reference oracle, so each instance is correct by construction. The clean IR is a known-optimal reference, messiness is dialed by strictly-nested anti-pattern profiles, each instance is labelled along two orthogonal difficulty axes, intrinsic (problem size) and incidental (presentation at fixed semantics), and contamination is resisted by minting fresh variants from a private held-out seed. We give construct-validity evidence that the quality order moves established complexity and readability metrics, and report baselines on a four-model open ladder: exact match rises with scale, and the intrinsic knob collapses arithmetic-aggregation accuracy of even the strongest model to zero. Further, development-set scores equal freshly re-minted held-out counterparts within Δ0.012|\Delta|\le 0.012 (comprehension) and 0.011\le 0.011 (refactoring); on identical programs, refactoring equivalence (0.730.990.73 \rightarrow 0.99) is scale-invariant while output prediction collapses; and ablating the generator's self-annotations shows they inflate the weakest model an order of magnitude more than the strongest (0.173-0.173 vs 0.017-0.017): the annotated ladder resolves one of three adjacent pairs where the unannotated resolves all three. Open source (MIT), dependency-free, archived under a persistent DOI.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18642,
  title  = {Spaghetti Architect: A Contamination-Resistant, By-Construction-Labelled, Multi-Language Code Dataset Generator},
  author = {Yuxiang Ji},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18642},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

32 pages. Under review at the Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR). Code: https://github.com/KurathSec/Spaghetti-Architect (artifact archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.21033174)