SkillForge: Self-Distilling Agents for Project-Specific Issue Resolution

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance on self-contained programming tasks. However, they still struggle with repository-level software engineering (SWE), which demands (1) deep codebase navigation with effective context management for accurate localization, and (2) systematic approaches for iterative, test-driven code modification to resolve issues. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-Adept, an LLM-based two-agent framework where a localization agent identifies issue-relevant code locations and a resolution agent implements the corresponding fixes. For issue localization, we introduce agent-directed depth-first search that selectively traverses code dependencies. This minimizes issue-irrelevant content in the agent's context window and improves localization accuracy. For issue resolution, we employ adaptive planning and structured problem solving. We equip the agent with specialized tools for progress tracking and Git-based version control. These tools interface with a shared working memory that stores code-state checkpoints indexed by execution steps, facilitating precise checkpoint retrieval. This design enables reliable agent-driven version-control operations for systematic issue resolution, including branching to explore alternative solutions and reverting failed edits. Experiments on SWE-Bench Lite and SWE-Bench Pro demonstrate that SWE-Adept consistently outperforms prior approaches in both issue localization and resolution, improving the end-to-end resolve rate by up to 4.3%.

Resolving a real software issue with a large language model (LLM) agent is a long repair episode, often tens to hundreds of steps spanning exploration, hypothesis, implementation, and verification. Success depends on both the base model's local reasoning and the agent's ability to maintain an evolving plan and remember observations across phases. Existing repository-level agents typically strengthen planning or memory in isolation, leaving long trajectories vulnerable to stale evidence, repeated failed edits, and verification inferred from the agent's own claims instead of execution evidence. We present PMCoder, an issue-resolution agent that couples a hierarchical phase planner with episodic memory. The coupling is bidirectional: the current plan phase conditions memory retrieval, while memory-derived trajectory statistics inform stuck detection and replanning. When available, issue-reproduction verdicts ground verification progress in execution evidence rather than self-reported completion. On SWE-bench Verified, PMCoder resolves an average of $25$ more cases ($+5.0$pp) than a harness-matched baseline, with gains persisting even where the reproduction gate never fires. Further Verified-500 evaluations show the same positive direction across Claude Haiku 4.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and an OpenHands port, with at least $14$ additional resolved cases ($+2.8$pp). Separately, evaluation on TerminalWorld's official sample suggests that the plan-memory substrate transfers beyond issue reports. Ablation and trajectory analyses show where the gains come from: coupling planning and memory outperforms either component alone and reduces repeated failed actions, empty-patch exits, and context-window exhaustion.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the software engineering landscape. Recently, numerous LLM-based agents have been developed to address real-world software issue fixing tasks. Despite their state-of-the-art performance, Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance, these agents face a significant challenge: Insufficient high-quality issue descriptions. Real-world datasets often exhibit misalignments between issue descriptions and their corresponding solutions, introducing noise and ambiguity that mislead automated agents and limit their problem-solving effectiveness. We propose SWE-Fuse, an issue-description-aware training framework that fuses issue-description-guided and issue-free samples for training SWE agents. It consists of two key modules: (1) An issue-free-driven trajectory learning module for mitigating potentially misleading issue descriptions while enabling the model to learn step-by-step debugging processes; and (2) An entropy-aware RLVR training module, which adaptively adjusts training dynamics through entropy-driven clipping. It applies relaxed clipping under high entropy to encourage exploration, and stricter clipping under low entropy to ensure training stability. We evaluate SWE-Fuse on the widely studied SWE-bench Verified benchmark shows to demonstrate its effectiveness in solving real-world software problems. Specifically, SWE-Fuse outperforms the best 8B and 32B baselines by 43.0% and 60.2% in solve rate, respectively. Furthermore, integrating SWE-Fuse with test-time scaling (TTS) enables further performance improvements, achieving solve rates of 49.8% and 65.2% under TTS@8 for the 8B and 32B models, respectively.