CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

TL;DR

CreativeBench provides a rigorous, quantitative benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, revealing insights into model behaviors and introducing EvoRePE to enhance creativity.

Contribution

The paper introduces CreativeBench, a novel benchmark for assessing machine creativity, and proposes EvoRePE, a strategy to improve creative outputs during inference.

Findings

Scaling improves combinatorial creativity but not exploration.

Larger models tend to become more correct but less divergent.

Reasoning skills mainly aid constrained exploration.

Abstract

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets -- CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore -- the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.