Does Pass Rate Tell the Whole Story? Evaluating Design Constraint Compliance in LLM-based Issue Resolution
Organizations: Fudan University, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Abstract
Repository-level issue resolution benchmarks have become a standard testbed for evaluating LLM-based agents, yet success is still predominantly measured by test pass rates. In practice, however, acceptable patches must also comply with project-specific design constraints, such as architectural conventions, error-handling policies, and maintainability requirements, which are rarely encoded in tests and are often documented only implicitly in code review discussions. This paper introduces design-aware issue resolution and presents \bench{}, a benchmark that makes such implicit design constraints explicit and measurable. \bench{} is constructed by mining and validating design constraints from real-world pull requests, linking them to issue instances, and automatically checking patch compliance using an LLM-based verifier, yielding 495 issues and 1,787 validated constraints across six repositories, aligned with SWE-bench-Verified and SWE-bench-Pro. Experiments with state-of-the-art agents show that test-based correctness substantially overestimates patch quality: fewer than half of resolved issues are fully design-satisfying, design violations are widespread, and functional correctness exhibits negligible statistical association with design satisfaction. While providing issue-specific design guidance reduces violations, substantial non-compliance remains, highlighting a fundamental gap in current agent capabilities and motivating design-aware evaluation beyond functional correctness.
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | Repository | #Iss. | #Cons. | Avg. Patch Lines | Lang. |
| SWE-Shield verified | django | 182 | 590 | 12.99 (max 156) | Python |
| sympy | 54 | 132 | |||
| SWE-Shield pro | ansible | 84 | 480 | 197.92 (max 2,028) | Multi (Py,Go,etc) |
| teleport | 73 | 331 | |||
| flipt | 62 | 149 | |||
| openlibrary | 40 | 105 |
| Dataset | Agent | DSR (%) | DVR (%) | DNR (%) | Pass (%) | P&S (%) | P&V (%) | F&S (%) | F&V (%) |
| SWE-Shield pro | SWE-agent (Gemini-2.5-Pro) | 41.50 | 39.92 | 18.58 | 13.44 | 4.74 | 8.70 | 36.76 | 49.80 |
| SWE-agent (Kimi-K2) | 40.71 | 43.08 | 16.21 | 18.18 | 7.51 | 10.67 | 33.20 | 48.62 | |
| SWE-agent (GPT-5) | 39.13 | 41.11 | 19.76 | 30.43 | 13.83 | 16.60 | 27.27 | 42.29 | |
| SWE-agent (Claude-Sonnet-4.5) | 50.20 | 37.15 | 12.65 | 42.69 | 22.53 | 20.16 | 27.67 | 29.64 | |
| SWE-Shield verified | Lingxi-v1.5 (Kimi-K2) | 32.64 | 43.39 | 23.97 | 70.25 | 25.62 | 44.63 | 7.02 | 22.73 |
| Sonar Foundation Agent (Claude-Sonnet-4.5) | 39.17 | 36.67 | 24.17 | 73.75 | 30.00 | 43.75 | 9.17 | 17.08 |
| Agent | -value | Cramér’s |
| SWE-agent (Kimi-K2) | 1.0000 | 0.0000 |
| SWE-agent (Gemini-2.5-Pro) | 0.5468 | 0.0379 |
| SWE-agent (GPT-5) | 0.4290 | 0.0497 |
| SWE-agent (Claude-Sonnet-4.5) | 0.5611 | 0.0365 |
| Live-SWE-agent (Gemini-3.0-pro) | 0.2858 | 0.0685 |
| Lingxi-v1.5 (Kimi-K2) | 0.0718 | 0.1157 |
LLM Agent Evaluation
Large language model agent evaluation measures whether tool-using systems complete tasks reliably, safely, and efficiently.
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