qwen3-8b-fix-git-v7-nat-examples

Negative-Aware Training (NAT) Dataset for Fix-Git Task

Based on paper: "Learning From Failure: Integrating Negative Examples when Fine-tuning Large Language Models as Agents" (arXiv 2402.11651)

What is NAT?

Negative-Aware Training (NAT) is a technique that improves LLM agent performance by training on both:

1. Positive examples - Correct trajectories that solve the task
2. Negative examples - Incorrect trajectories that demonstrate common mistakes

The key insight: Models learn better when they see both what TO do and what NOT to do.

How NAT Works

1. Explicit Differentiation

Positive and negative examples have different system prompts:

Positive prompt suffix:

<training_mode>
You are being shown a CORRECT example of how to solve this task.
Generate tool calls that follow the exact format shown, with only the required parameters.
Do NOT add extra parameters like message_title, message_description, or type.
When the task is complete, respond with a brief summary (NO tool call).
</training_mode>

Negative prompt suffix:

<training_mode>
WARNING: The following is an INCORRECT example that demonstrates common mistakes.
This trajectory contains errors such as:
- Adding unnecessary parameters (message_title, message_description)
- Looping on the same commands after task completion
- Using wrong command formats
Learn to AVOID these patterns.
</training_mode>

2. Training Process

• Both positive and negative examples are mixed in the training data
• The model learns to associate the positive prompt with correct behavior
• The model learns to associate the negative prompt with incorrect behavior
• At inference time, only the positive prompt is used

3. Inference

During inference, we use ONLY the positive prompt. The model has learned:

• What correct tool calls look like
• What mistakes to avoid

Dataset Composition

Example Comparisons

Positive Example (Correct)

{
  "name": "shell_exec",
  "arguments": "{\"id\": \"survey\", \"command\": \"pwd && ls -la && git status\", \"block\": true}"
}

Negative Example 1: Hallucinated Arguments ❌

{
  "name": "shell_exec", 
  "arguments": "{\"id\": \"survey\", \"command\": \"pwd && ls -la && git status\", \"block\": true, \"message_title\": \"Survey\", \"message_description\": \"Performing system survey\"}"
}

Problem: Extra message_title and message_description parameters that don't exist in the tool schema.

Negative Example 2: Looping Behavior ❌

After task is already complete (merge done, working tree clean), the model generates:

{
  "name": "shell_exec",
  "arguments": "{\"id\": \"loop_merge\", \"command\": \"git merge 650dba4 --no-ff -m \\\"Merge Stanford changes into master\\\"\", \"block\": true}"
}

Problem: Repeating the merge command when the task is already done.

Negative Example 3: Wrong Command Format ❌

{
  "name": "shell_exec",
  "arguments": "{\"id\": \"survey\", \"command\": \"survey\", \"block\": true}"
}

Problem: Using the id value as the command instead of an actual shell command.

Why NAT Works

From the paper:

• +8.74% improvement with 2k positive + 10k negative examples
• Models implicitly learn from negative samples when combined with positive ones
• The improvement is more substantial when there are fewer positive examples (data-scarce scenarios)
• High-quality negative examples are crucial - low-quality negatives can hurt performance

Files

tokenized_fix_git_v7_nat/
├── train.parquet          # Training data (tokenized)
├── val.parquet            # Validation data (tokenized)
├── README.md              # This file
└── examples/              # Human-readable examples
    ├── positive_messages.json
    ├── negative_hallucinated.json
    ├── negative_looping.json
    ├── negative_wrong_cmd.json
    ├── positive_text.txt
    └── negative_hallucinated_text.txt

Training Command

torchrun --nproc_per_node=2 src/tbench_sft/tbench_sft.py \
    --config src/tbench_sft/config/experiment_fix_git_overfit_v7_nat.yaml

References

• Wang et al. (2024). "Learning From Failure: Integrating Negative Examples when Fine-tuning Large Language Models as Agents". NAACL 2025. arXiv:2402.11651
• GitHub: Reason-Wang/NAT