Ockhamareto: Pareto-Gated Segment-Level Credit Assignment for Concise Unit-Test Generation with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

We introduce \textbf{Ockhamareto}, a single-shot GRPO framework for unit-test generation and selection, based on the principles of \emph{Ockham's Razor} and \emph{Pareto Optimality}. Ockhamareto has two principal components: (i)~a \emph{Pareto-gated Bonus} that rewards only rollouts non-dominated in~(mutation, $-$\#tests) space, and (ii)~\emph{Token-level Segment Credit}, which attributes each test's marginal mutation kills back to the tokens of its unit-test block. On the \emph{UnLeakedTestBench~(ULT)}, Ockhamareto \emph{strictly Pareto-dominates} the strongest RL baseline~(\emph{MIST-RL}). Furthermore, it dominates on {\em each and all} optimization objectives, catching more bugs ($49.9\%$ vs $31.3\%$ mutation score at $N{=}5$), using \emph{fewer} tests ($2.60$ vs $4.67$ on average), thereby achieving $3.4\times$ the per-test trade-off improvement. The advantage is found in all four benchmarks~(\emph{HumanEval+}, \emph{MBPP+}, \emph{CodeContests}, \emph{TestGenEval-Lite}): Ockhamareto leads both mutation and coverage metrics on every one, always with the smallest suite. Ockhamareto also outperforms the state-of-the-art at all model scales, adding $+30$--$35$~pp mutation at 4B, 9B, and 27B model sizes. We also show that the knee point of the optimal trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness on the Pareto front is not correlated with obvious more easily computed proxy metrics, such as function size. This finding motivates the Pareto front computation; it is needed to identify this crucial engineering trade-off for each function under test.