
Programming with Data: Test-Driven Data Engineering for Self-Improving LLMs from Raw Corpora
From Daily Paper Cast by Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
April 30, 2026 · 24 min · Episode 1818
About this episode
This episode discusses the challenges of transferring human knowledge into large language models and presents a structured approach to data engineering that parallels software development.
🤗 Upvotes: 75 | cs.SE, cs.AI Authors: Chenkai Pan, Xinglong Xu, Yuhang Xu, Yujun Wu, Siyuan Li, Jintao Chen, Conghui He, Jingxuan Wei, Cheng Tan Title: Programming with Data: Test-Driven Data Engineering for Self-Improving LLMs from Raw Corpora Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24819v1 Abstract: Reliably transferring specialized human knowledge from text into large language models remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Fine-tuning on domain corpora has enabled substantial capability gains, but the process operates without feedback: when a model fails on a domain task, there is no method to diagnose what is deficient in the training data, and the only recourse is to add more data indiscriminately. Here we show that when a structured knowledge representation extracted from the source corpus serves as the shared foundation for both training data and evaluation, the complete data-engineering lifecycle maps onto the software development lifecycle in a precise and operative way: training data becomes source code specifying what the model should learn, model training becomes compilation, benchmarking becomes unit testing, and failure-driven data repair becomes…
People in this episode
Hosts: Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
Topics covered
- data engineering
- large language models
- artificial intelligence
- test-driven development
- knowledge representation
- model training
- data repair
Keywords
- test-driven data engineering
- self-improving LLMs
- domain corpora
- model failures
- data deficiencies
- knowledge transfer
- feedback mechanisms
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: arxiv
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