Evaluating Gemma4 Models as AI Teaching Assistants for Introductory Parallel Programming: A DataRaceBench Study (opens in new tab)

Debugging data races is a major challenge for students learning parallel programming due to the non-deterministic nature of concurrent execution and the complexity of shared-memory semantics. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest that they could serve as AI teaching assistants, but the capabilities of lower-cost open-weight models for parallel debugging remain unclear. In this paper, we evaluate two Gemma4 open-weight models, G...