cs.SESep 1, 2026

Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation

Authors: Kefeng DuanDewu ZhengYanlin WangXiwen WangEnsheng ShiXilin LiuYuchi MaJiachi Chen+2 more

Organizations: School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, China · Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd., China · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Abstract

Evaluating software engineering agents on realistic benchmarks is costly, since each task may require multi-step code exploration, modification, and test execution. Existing efficient evaluation methods select representative subsets to estimate full-benchmark performance, but are largely result-only: they fit historical pass/fail response matrices or static task semantics, discarding how agents solve problems. We propose PTA-IRT, a Privileged Trajectory-Aware Item Response Theory framework that fuses process and outcome signals. Historical execution trajectories supply process-level evidence beyond pass/fail, such as explored context, attempted edits, and solving paths, which PTA-IRT uses as privileged information for calibration subset selection and ability estimation. Under low calibration budgets, PTA-IRT consistently outperforms prior IRT baselines on score and ranking recovery across four SWE benchmarks. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/PTA-IRT.

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