To Tab or Not to Tab: Measuring Critical Engagement in AI Code Completion Tools Using Behavioral Signals and Attention Checks

AI code completion tools, such as Github Copilot, provide students with code suggestions to help them write programs. However, recent qualitative studies suggest that students fail to critically evaluate these suggestions. We present Clover, a code completion tool that logs students' interactions with code suggestions and additionally offers attention checks to probe reflective engagement during programming tasks. We also develop a taxonomy of behavioral interaction metrics for AI-assisted programming, informed by literature. We analyzed relationships between interaction patterns, engagement with attention checks, and task performance. We observed that higher rates of tab accept were associated with lower attention check performance, while increased dwell time was associated with higher attention check performance. We conclude by discussing how programming process data and attention checks might support reflective engagement in AI-assisted programming.

Compositional Behavioral Semantics for State Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning

State abstraction plays a key role in scaling reinforcement learning to complex but structured systems. In studying such systems, a wide range of behavioral structures have been studied in reinforcement learning, including value functions, invariants, bisimulation relations, and behavioral metrics. However, a general principle for determining what structures are provably preserved under state abstraction is still lacking. In this paper, we present a unified framework for defining and analyzing behavioral structures in reinforcement learning. Our framework provides a compositional way to specify behavioral semantics based on local, one-step descriptions of system dynamics. Using this framework, we establish results showing how behavioral structures can be safely transferred between abstract and concrete systems. We further show how to construct quantitative metrics from logical behavioral semantics with soundness guarantees. Together, these results provide a principled foundation for reasoning about behaviors under state abstraction in reinforcement learning and offer reusable definition and proof principles for a broad class of behavioral structures in reinforcement learning.