Code Quality

Local LLM agents such as OpenClaw and Nanobot run on end-user machines and act on host resources - the shell, filesystem, browser, stored credentials, and messaging applications - through natural-language goals. These agents have become privileged software runtimes that mediate between user intent, model outputs, and host-level actions. Existing research characterizes the landscape through prompt injection, malicious skills, marketplace risks, or black-box evaluation of agents. But the implementation layer that performs this mediation, the prompt builder, parser, tool dispatcher, skill loader, memory writer, network client, and permission gate, has remained an unexamined safety boundary. To our knowledge, no prior work has examined the agent's source tree to audit these components for implementation-level security weaknesses. We present CLAWAUDIT, a static auditing framework for measuring vulnerability exposure in local LLM agent runtimes. CLAWAUDIT derives a five-category vulnerability taxonomy from STRIDE and develops custom static-analysis rules that target agent-specific patterns absent from established rule sets for vulnerability analysis. We instantiate the taxonomy in two backends, 47 Semgrep YAML rules and 30 CodeQL queries, and evaluate on OPENCLAWBENCH, a benchmark of 446 source-code-level advisories from the OpenClaw repository and split temporally into 229 rule-derivation (train) and 217 held-out (test) advisories. On the held-out test, CLAWAUDIT raises Semgrep recall from 21.7% (Pro baseline) to 66.8%, and CodeQL recall from 13.8% (security-extended) to 75.1%. Train/test gaps remain within 4 percentage points for all four configurations, indicating that the rules generalize to vulnerabilities unseen during rule writing. A preliminary live-code audit shows that these recall-oriented rules require manual triage, motivating semantic filtering before production deployment.

Software engineering has long inferred where a system's knowledge resides from who authored its code. The truck factor, the Degree-of-Authorship metric, and the degree-of-knowledge model all rest on one inference -- that authoring a region of code is evidence of understanding it -- and for most of software's history it was a workable proxy, because code entered a repository only when a human wrote it, which forced at least transient understanding. This paper argues that AI code generation severs that inference at its root, and that the consequence is not the degradation of the authorship-based metrics but their invalidation as a class. When an agent generates a module and a human merges it, the version-control record still attributes authorship, but the attribution no longer licenses any conclusion about comprehension: the same footprint is now compatible with full, partial, or no understanding. The metric still returns a number; the number measures a substrate that has come uncoupled from the quantity it was used to estimate. The collapse is corroborated by the field's own measurement failures, and the methodological corollary is load-bearing: the instrument the comprehension-debt era needs cannot be built by refining the knowledge-concentration metrics, because no function of an authorship footprint recovers an inference the footprint no longer supports. The replacement must be grounded in evidence of comprehension rather than authorship. I state a falsifiable prediction that discriminates the two -- that systems with a healthy authorship-derived truck factor but low comprehension-measured retention will suffer incident-resolution failures the authorship metric does not predict -- and argue that building the comprehension-grounded instrument at the scale of a system and a team is the field's open measurement problem, left open here.

Software practitioners increasingly use AI coding agents that generate test code alongside production code in open source pull requests (PRs). Recent studies report more than 932,000 agent-authored PRs across more than 116,000 repositories, yet whether their test files contain meaningful verification logic remains underexplored. Test files lacking explicit assertions execute code without verifying behavior, so quality gates based on test-file presence overestimate verification strength. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners assess the verification strength of agent-authored patches by characterizing oracle signals and their link to merge outcomes and review effort. We conduct an empirical study of 86,156 test-file patches from 33,596 agent-authored PRs across 2,807 GitHub repositories produced by five coding agents: OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Cursor, and Claude Code. A qualitative analysis of 384 stratified patches informs a syntactic taxonomy of eight oracle signal categories. Applied at scale, 80.2% of test patches contain weak or no explicit oracle signals. While raw merge rates are lower for strong-oracle PRs, a regression analysis adjusting for agent, PR size, repository popularity, task type, and language shows strong oracles significantly improve merge likelihood (OR = 1.28, p < 0.001). Our findings suggest that test file counts substantially overestimate verification strength and that practitioners can adopt oracle-aware quality checks to more accurately evaluate agent-authored contributions.

Pre-submission hardening of human-authored LaTeX computer science papers differs from drafting assistance because it requires adversarial whole-paper review, explicit no-fix outcomes, and bounded artifact-safe revision. Existing writing assistants, critique generators, and judge-centered loops lack durable issue identity across rounds, deterministic routing from critique to adjudication, and manuscript control that can reject invalid concerns or defer author-dependent ones. We present PaperJury, a closed-loop review-verdict-revise-verify system built on a deterministic-versus-semantic split: deterministic orchestration manages decomposition, a frozen claim spine, a durable ledger, routing, stopping, and exact-once patch application, while semantic agents are limited to bounded review, judgment, and repair. PaperJury combines bounded holistic review, contestability-based routing, a due-process trial, and risk-proportional guard chains for anchor-bounded edits, yielding terminal outcomes of invalid-drop, valid-fixable, and author-required. In a two-arm expert-review evaluation on held-out Vision, natural language processing, and machine learning papers against four baselines, we assess issue quality, verdict and routing quality, edit safety, convergence behavior, and cost, supporting the thesis that load-bearing safety and completion logic should reside in deterministic orchestration rather than model discretion. PaperJury is available at https://github.com/u7079256/paperjury.

We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

We ran 300 repeated vulnerability-finding scans to measure how repeatable agentic large language model (LLM) security review is on the same JavaScript code, prompt, and benchmark harness. The headline result is that LLM security findings were unevenly repeatable: reference-matched findings were stable, but extra model reports varied heavily from run to run. Across 250 model runs, 80 of 161 unique unmatched findings appeared in only one of five identical repetitions, while only 22 appeared in all five. By contrast, when Claude matched a Snyk Code reference finding, the behavior was much more stable: 134 of 158 unique reference-matched findings appeared in all five repetitions. The benchmark also shows complementarity. Models consistently found familiar, high-signal exploit shapes, and in one case surfaced a likely Snyk Code product gap. Snyk Code static application security testing (SAST) was deterministic and better at systematically enumerating repeated data-flow sinks. The results support combining agentic LLM review with deterministic SAST rather than treating either technique as a replacement for the other.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p<0.05, paired t-test), with particularly strong gains on security audit (+27.6%), code generation (+20.8%), and architecture design (+15.6%). A second scorer (mimo-v2.5-pro) confirms the direction with a smaller effect (+2.7%), suggesting moderate inter-rater agreement. However, the system shows a -7.5% degradation on requirements analysis, revealing that adversarial review architectures have a structural bias toward simplification that is counterproductive for completeness-oriented tasks. We analyze this boundary condition through a task-type framework and demonstrate that reviewer prompt adaptation partially mitigates the issue. Our findings provide the first empirical characterization of when multi-model adversarial review helps versus harms, with implications for the design of collaborative AI systems.

LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

Recent work has demonstrated that coding agents can formalize entire advanced mathematics textbooks in Lean 4, yet existing efforts concentrate on branches of mathematics already well-represented in mathlib and measure success solely through kernel acceptance. We address both limitations by applying a coding agent to formalize Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations, a textbook in numerical analysis that is largely absent from mathlib, stressing the agent's capacity to develop new theory from scratch. We further introduce a systematic, reproducible three-dimensional framework for evaluating the quality of agent-produced formalizations beyond compilation: semantic correctness, Mathlib reuse, and cross-file reuse via LLM-as-judge methods. Applying this framework to our own formalization and to the released outputs of RepoProver and M2F, we uncover recurring unfaithful formalization patterns, including incomplete multi-part statements, added weakening hypotheses, and parameter restrictions, that kernel acceptance entirely obscures. Our results suggest that compilation-based metrics substantially overstate formalization quality, and we provide a reproducible audit methodology to support more rigorous evaluation of future autoformalization systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in automated code-review systems, where their approvals can determine which code is merged into shared repositories. However, it is unclear whether review agents can detect vulnerability-introducing code when an attacker controls both the code change and the persuasive Pull Request (PR) narrative designed to mask it. We introduce SEVRA-BENCH (Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents), a benchmark that measures how often a review agent approves such adversarial PR s. Each PR in SEVRA-BENCH is built from a historical commit that fixed a vulnerability. We automatically reverse that fix to extract the original vulnerable code, and submit the resulting code change as a PR wrapped in one of 15 social-engineering framings. To test review-agent resilience to narrative manipulation, these framings vary dimensions such as supporting evidence, conveyed urgency, signals of prior approval, and appeals to authority. SEVRA-BENCH evaluates a retained challenge split of roughly 1000 adversarial PRs drawn from publicly disclosed vulnerability fixes across the top 10 entries of the MITRE's 2025 most dangerous software weaknesses. Evaluating 8 review agents against this benchmark, we reveal that review agents are susceptible to narrative manipulation, exposing a significant gap in security capabilities.

As AI-generated reviews move from experimental tools into peer-review infrastructure, most robustness concerns have focused on explicit attacks such as hidden instructions and prompt injection. We study a harder and more policy-relevant failure mode: no hidden text, no prompt injection, and no changes to methods, experiments, figures, equations, proofs, or numerical results. The attacker modifies only presentation-level content, such as the abstract, contribution framing, related work, discussion, and narrative structure. We introduce adversarial repackaging: a closed-loop attack that uses AI-reviewer feedback to search for presentation-level revisions while keeping the scientific evidence fixed. Across three mainstream AI reviewers, adversarial repackaging achieves a 75.1% attack success rate and a mean score gain of +1.21/10. The effect is not explained by ordinary prose polishing. We also reveal that strategies that change how the reviewer interprets the paper, such as related-work repositioning and analytical discussion expansion, substantially outperform surface edits such as local polishing, table formatting, and algorithm boxes. Our analysis reveals two deeper structural failure modes. First, AI reviewers are easier to impress than to convince: highlighting strengths reliably increases perceived merit, while attempts to dissolve weaknesses frequently backfire. Second, AI reviewers can confuse the appearance of addressing a limitation with actually resolving it, allowing unchanged evidence to be reinterpreted as stronger scientific contribution. These results show that the deployment risk is not only malicious hidden instructions, but the emergence of paper presentation itself as an optimization surface. We release a contamination-free rolling benchmark and attack framework for testing whether AI reviewers remain anchored to scientific content under presentation-only edits.

Thanks to the rapid adoption of AI code assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), industry codebases are, increasingly, a hybrid of AI- and human-authored code. For risk management and productivity analysis purposes, it is crucial to enable fine-grained location detection of AI-generated code. To develop algorithms for this task, quality benchmarks are needed to assess performance. However, existing benchmarks tend to comprise academic, LeetCode-style problems and presume a code snippet is either completely human-authored or completely AI-authored, which is not reflective of the diverse intents and styles of industry codebases utilizing AI code assistants. To fill these gaps, we introduce HybridCodeAuthorship, a novel benchmark of Python code files with interleaved human- and AI-authored lines of code to simulate authentic utilization of AI code assistants. In this paper, we first present our dataset construction pipeline, which leverages CodeSearchNet, a massive collection of links to open sourced repositories on GitHub. We then benchmark the performance of two state-of-the-art AI-generated code detection algorithms at both the line- and chunk-level. Experimental results demonstrate that HybridCodeAuthorship is a challenging benchmark with a top-scoring algorithm, AIGCode Detector, obtaining a highest F1 score of 0.48 and 0.56 on chunk-level and line-level code detection tasks, respectively.

The adoption of AI-powered Integrated Development Environments (AI IDEs) has introduced "Rules" as a novel software artifact, allowing developers to persistently inject project-specific constraints and architectural guidelines into the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their role in aligning AI behavior with developer intent, the taxonomy, evolution, and practical impact of these rules remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study on AI IDE rules. By mining 83 open-source projects and extracting 7,310 rules, we established a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 5 primary and 25 secondary categories. We then triangulated these artifacts with survey responses from 99 practitioners. Our analysis identified a contrast between developer priorities and actual configurations: while practitioners rate architectural constraints as highly important, rule files in repositories primarily consist of low-level workflow and code formatting constraints. Furthermore, our analysis of 1,540 rule evolution events revealed that rules are updated frequently. Repository data further indicate that rule evolution is primarily driven by constructive context expansions (29.17%) and enrichments (26.59%). In contrast, surveyed developers reported modifying rules primarily to correct AI errors (77.78%), typically by adding new negative constraints rather than editing existing ones. Finally, an artifact compliance assessment of 160 rule evolution events revealed that updating rules significantly improves the adherence of software artifacts, with the average artifact compliance rate increasing by 22.99% (from 49.14% to 72.13%) following an update. Our study provides empirical insights that can help developers optimize prompting strategies and guide tool builders in designing automated conflict-detection and context-management mechanisms for AI IDEs.

Multi-agent code generation offers a promising paradigm for autonomous software development by simulating the human software engineering lifecycle. However, system reliability remains hindered by LLM hallucinations and error propagation across interacting agents. While semantic entropy provides a principled way to quantify uncertainty without ground-truth answers, current methods often rely on costly LLM-driven equivalence checks. In this work, we introduce Fast Adaptive Semantic Entropy (FASE), a novel metric that approximates functional correctness based on the minimum spanning tree of structural and semantic dissimilarity graphs. Evaluations on HumanEval and BigCodeBench demonstrate that FASE outperforms state-of-the-art semantic entropy by LLM entailment, achieving a 25% average improvement in Spearman correlation and a 19% increase in ROCAUC score against Pass@1 from ground-truth test cases when using the Qwen3-Embedding-8B model. Furthermore, by eliminating costly LLM-driven equivalence evaluation, FASE incurs negligible computational overhead, requiring only approximately 0.3% of the runtime cost of traditional semantic entropy approaches. These results position FASE as a practical, cost-effective solution for optimizing uncertainty quantification in real-world multi-agent workflows.

The quality of software engineering is still under a challenge due to disjointed processes between requirements, testing, and production, which hinders the opportunity to implement quality strategies in consecutive releases. Existing approaches tend to be fixed-model or single-optimization approaches and lack production feedback learning mechanisms. The paper at hand proposes a closed-loop reference architecture of continuous software quality intelligence with AI enhancements. The model synthesizes requirement feature mining, risk-based test prioritization, defect prediction, and production incident analysis as an element of a feedback-based pipeline. A limited feedback learning model is introduced that is used to propagate the production signal-based on defect severity and incident impact- to the following release to ensure stability, and the time. The method is evaluated using a semi-synthetic test dataset of 4,500 requirements, 27,049 test cases, 13,089 defects and 7,841 incidents in six release cycles. The experimental results show that the proposed system reduces the defect leakage by 0.19 to 0.13, increases the effectiveness of the detection system to 0.72 to 0.84, and shortens the test execution by up to 35 percent compared to the non-adaptive baselines. The changes are stable release to release. The findings indicate that through the integration of feedback-based learning in a closed-loop architecture, it can be continued to enhance quality process, which offers practical foundation of adaptive quality engineering of software.

Automatic decompilers produce functionally correct but often unreadable C code. This paper addresses one stage of the reverse engineering workflow: improving the readability of decompiled code using LLM agents guided by quantitative metrics. We present a three-phase research evolution. Phase 1 (tool-driven steering via Ghidra MCP) suffered from incomplete coverage and inconsistent improvements due to lack of quantitative guidance. Phase 2 (structural similarity validation alone) revealed that agents optimize for metrics in unintended ways, producing structurally equivalent but less readable code. Our contribution is the Quantitative Readability Score (QRS) framework, a composite metric combining a structural similarity gate with three independent readability sub-metrics (Lexical Surprisal, Structural Simplicity, and Idiomatic Quality). We demonstrate that QRS-guided refinement enables LLM agents to make targeted readability improvements without sacrificing correctness. We provide a discussion of the broader reverse engineering workflow (binary lifting, decompilation cleanup, and achieving functional equivalence) as context, however, it remains out of scope.

Hate moderation is often evaluated as classification on clean English inputs, but deployed systems must route content to actions such as ALLOW, FLAG, or REVIEW. We study how this workflow changes under code-mixed inputs using a paired evaluation setting where the same underlying content is expressed as clean English and Tamil-English code-mix. Under thresholds tuned on clean English development data, code-mixed inputs produce substantial action instability, with a paired clean- to-code-mix decision flip rate of 0.265. The main workflow effects are increased review burden and increased false-flagging of non-hateful content: review rate rises from 0.138 to 0.297 and non-hate false-flag rate rises from 0.069 to 0.104. Tamil-only inputs show stronger degradation overall, suggesting a broader language-coverage limitation rather than the same code-mixed instability pattern. A simple disagreement-based deferral rule reduces automatic errors on stressed inputs, but only by increasing review load. These results show that workflow-level evaluation reveals moderation failures that standard classification summaries can miss.

Producing a labeled vulnerable code at scale is a recurring obstacle for learning-based vulnerability detection: mined corpora carry substantial label noise, and existing LLM-based augmentation propagates these inaccuracies because it transforms vulnerable seeds rather than synthesising vulnerabilities from a specification. A complementary route is to start from safe code and ask an instruction-tuned LLM to inject a specified CWE (which would shift the labeling burden from open-ended detection to bounded binary confirmation) but safety-aligned code LLMs systematically refuse such prompts. This paper is a preliminary feasibility study of abliteration, a low-rank weight edit that orthogonally projects out the refusal direction in the residual stream, as a tool to remove this barrier. We use Python and CWE-89 (SQL injection) as a case study, evaluating the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct family at 3B, 7B, and 14B parameters on safe samples drawn from PromSec and SafeCoder, replicated three times per condition. We find that (i) refusal on injection prompts is strongly size- and prompt-context-dependent: the 14B refuses 100% of prompts, the 7B refuses 73% of PromSec but only 5% of SafeCoder, whereas the 3B is essentially never blocked; (ii) abliteration reduces refusal to zero or near-zero across all sizes while leaving syntactic validity above 93%, supporting the view that, in this setting, refusal can be detached from measured code-generation capability; and (iii) the post-abliteration injection rate remains capacity-bound (88-97% on the 14B, 89-90% on the 7B, and 25-48% on the 3B) separating willingness, which abliteration unlocks, from capability, which scales with parameters. Vulnerability verdicts are produced by a three-tool detector ensemble (CodeQL, Semgrep, Bandit) followed by manual adjudication by two authors on detector-positive outputs.

Security teams routinely simulate attacks against their own systems to check whether their monitoring would catch a real intruder. These Breach-and-Attack-Simulation (BAS) tools surface findings, but the security information and event management (SIEM) systems that watch production need detection rules -- and today a human bridges that gap by hand, reading each finding and writing the corresponding Sigma rule (a vendor-neutral detection format). We show this translation can be partially automated when probes are drawn from a locked corpus, so each finding carries a stable identifier back to the originating probe. We describe a deterministic synthesis function that maps each finding to a starter Sigma rule through a small template library (N=23, indexed by categories from the OWASP LLM and Web Top 10), with a back-reference to the originating finding and its MITRE ATT&CK technique. On two locked corpora (17-probe LLM, 23-probe Web), every bypassed-probe finding yields a starter rule, and all 17/17 emitted rules parse and convert to Splunk and Elasticsearch backends. Replayed through a live OpenSearch SIEM, the LLM rules fire on 30% of a held-out AdvBench subset and 14% of HarmBench at 7.7% false positives on a benign baseline; the Web side is validated structurally, not against a held-out attack set. The contribution is a verifiable, byte-stable path from BAS finding to operator-deployable starter rule, re-derivable from the published corpus and template library alone -- trading the breadth of LLM-generative methods for exact reproducibility and a typed traceback from any fired alert to the originating probe.

Research is advancing faster than ever with artificial intelligence (AI); and so are the corresponding research papers. The exploding volume of AI-generated papers have put a strain to peer review, leading to the usage of AI-generated review, potentially wide yet sneaky. However, relevant ethical concerns about confidentiality, quality, and fairness are raised and no consensus has been reached in the broad research community. We expect the debate to continue for a while, but in the meantime, we ask an alternative, practical question: \textit{can AI review improve paper drafting?} We study 20 computer architecture papers, with varying levels of submission lineage, to expose how well AI review aligns with human review, quantified by a set of metrics we define. To conduct the case study, we build a web UI-integrated tool, \emph{AI-Paper-Review}, that generates structured AI review of a draft paper, available at https://github.com/unarylab/ai-paper-review. This tool selects several AI reviewers from a diverse pool of AI reviewers and clusters and ranks their comments based on commonality and importance of review comments. It also allows to align AI comments with human comments to facilitate metric-based validation. The case study shows that AI review can cover a significant fraction of human-raised issues, but also raises issues missing in human review. This paper is not intended to encourage using AI for peer review at the current stage, but to study that (1) how AI review can improve paper drafting and (2) the potential and limitation of AI-based peer review. The release of the tool and the case study data is intended to instigate future research on this topic. Misuse for peer review would violate the ethics policies from major academic venues.

Credential leakage in public source code repositories poses a critical security threat, with over 23.8 million secrets exposed in 2024 alone. Existing detection tools suffer from high false-positive rates because rigid pattern matching and binary classification schemes fail to distinguish genuine credentials from placeholder or weak credentials. We propose a three-class classification framework that explicitly models placeholder or weak credentials as a distinct class, leveraging CodeBERT-based semantic understanding combined with character-level pattern recognition. We evaluate our approach on a newly constructed dataset of 9,426 samples spanning 10 programming languages. Our model achieves a Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.86 and a macro F1-score of 0.90, achieving 93% recall and 89% precision for genuine credential leaks while reducing high severity alerts by 33.0% (from 373 to 250) without sacrificing security coverage. Compared to prior character-level approaches, our method improves placeholder or weak credential detection from 54% to 81% F1-score while maintaining strong cross language generalization, with 9 of 10 languages achieving F1 above 0.80 under leave-one-language-out evaluation.

Software tools for reverse engineering executable binary files, such as Ghidra, enable malware analysts to safely conduct robust static analysis without having access to original source code. Coupled with the analytic power of large language models (LLM), agentic systems enabled with tools, such as GhidraMCP, can allow analysts to automate a previously human driven process. Although this automation can increase the productivity of a single malware analyst, it also introduces a new area of vulnerability for malware obfuscation. This paper presents an adversarial technique using genetic algorithm-based prompt generation, a modification of an adversarial attack known as AutoDAN, to demonstrate the ability to deceive LLM-powered disassembly and decompilation systems into misinterpreting binary executables, effectively corrupting their analytical output. This proof-of-concept methodology exploits inherent vulnerabilities in how LLMs process and interpret decompiled machine code via prompt injection by using extraneous string variable assignments to pass surreptitious instructions to the LLM while not impacting the functionality of the executable file. We demonstrate this capability through several concise examples. This approach could enable attackers to bypass automated detection systems that rely on LLM-driven analysis pipelines. By studying and understanding this attack, insights can be gained regarding the security implication of integrating LLMs into cybersecurity toolchains and building more robust agentic code analysis systems.

AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

A general-purpose language model that answers a harmful question returns text; a coding model that complies with a malicious request can return a working weapon: a keylogger, ransomware, an exploit that runs as written. This asymmetry in the severity of a single act of compliance implies coding-specialized models should clear a higher refusal bar than general-purpose chat models, not a lower one, yet the field cannot tell whether they do. Refusal benchmarks for malicious code are fragmented: they mix requests for executable software with requests for harmful security knowledge and report refusal rates over non-comparable corpora. This paper's central result is that the CODE-versus-KNOWLEDGE classification axis established in a prior four-corpus release remains stable under a substantially expanded corpus pool and an independently refreshed judge panel, evidence that it measures a real construct rather than an artifact of the prompts or judges. Eight corpora spanning diverse elicitation paradigms (direct, jailbreak-decorated, indirect, and agent/interpreter: ASTRA, CySecBench, AdvBench/harmful_behaviors, JailbreakBench, MalwareBench, RedCode, RMCBench, Scam2Prompt) are classified under a five-judge consensus protocol (6,675 prompts x 5 judges = 33,375 calls), reaching Fleiss' kappa = 0.767 [95% CI 0.755, 0.777] ("substantial"). Critically, the panel shares no judge with the prior release (five paid commercial APIs replaced by five open-weight models from five vendors), yet the two panels agree on 94.45% of the 3,133 shared prompts and reach Cohen's kappa = 0.952 [0.942, 0.963] on the 3,031-prompt binary overlap: the axis survives near-total panel replacement. The released bank comprises 4,748 consensus-CODE and 1,923 consensus-KNOWLEDGE prompts, a reliability-quantified benchmark whose central classification axis is shown stable across corpus expansion and judge-panel replacement.

Large language models (LLMs) for code completion and generation are increasingly used in software development, yet they may reproduce training examples verbatim and without authorship attribution, raising legal and ethical concerns around plagiarism and license compliance. Classical fingerprint-based plagiarism detectors based on fingerprinting, such as Winnowing, remain highly effective, yet the inspection requires comparing fragments of code to the entire training set, and their linear-time search makes them impractical for the billion-scale corpora used to train modern code LLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce SOURCETRACKER, a 300M-parameter encoder tailored for code retrieval, together with a hybrid two-stage provenance-tracking pipeline HYBRIDSOURCETRACKER (HST). HST first narrows down a small set of candidate snippets via vector search, then re-ranks those candidates using Winnowing on exact fingerprints. We train and evaluate our system on a 10M-snippet subset of the THESTACKV2 dataset, with both verbatim and adapted snippets that emulate realistic identifier renaming. On an in vitro 100k-snippet search space with adapted queries, our hybrid approach reaches a mean reciprocal rank on par with Winnowing for 30-token fragments. Then, starting from windows >= 60 tokens, it consistently over-performs by up to 5.4% while preserving logarithmic-time query complexity. In a complementary evaluation using an LLM-based judge, we find that many retrieved snippets not labeled as ground truth are still highly similar to the expected sources, particularly with longer context windows, and thus remain useful for end users. Overall, our results demonstrate that integrating vector search with fingerprinting enables scalable, high-precision provenance tracking for code produced by LLMs.

We present E3, an automated review assistant that augments reviewers and engineering teams by identifying decision-relevant technical concerns in research papers. For each concern, E3 reports its nature, its location, its bearing on the contribution, and the analysis or evidence that would resolve it, covering unsupported claims, missing ablations, weak baselines, hidden assumptions, threats to validity, and leakage risks. To evaluate E3 without contamination confounds we adopt an issue-level backtesting protocol: the corpus is restricted to papers postdating the training cutoff of every automated source, and for each paper a meta-judge that observes only anonymised reviews labels every issue-source pair as Caught, Partial, or Missed. Applied to 100 ICLR 2026 papers and 4598 judged issue rows, comparing E3 against the ICLR human reviews and two prompt-matched LLM baselines built on gpt-5.4 from OpenAI and claude-opus-4-6 from Anthropic, with meta-judge gpt-5.5, E3 attains the highest recall on every aggregate metric. Partial-inclusive recall reaches 90.2 percent, which is 15.5 points over GPT, 17.1 points over Claude, and 29.2 points over the human reviews, and strict recall preserves the ordering at 65.8 percent. On concerns raised by the human reviewers, E3 recovers 89.6 percent; on concerns the human reviewers missed it surfaces 1635 additional rows admitted into the judged union, 406 above the next-best source. Corpus, baseline prompts, judge prompt template, and evaluation code are released.

LLM-generated peer reviews are increasingly common at major venues, yet their deficiencies are hard to detect because they are uniformly fluent and well-structured. Existing work either classifies authorship without judging quality, or scores quality with features designed for human-written reviews; no prior system detects deficiencies in LLM-generated reviews at the level of individual defect types. To bridge the gap, we introduce TADDLE, a Tool-Augmented Agent for Detecting Deficient LLM-Generated Peer Reviews, together with the first expert-annotated benchmark for this task. Our benchmark comprises 1,800 reviews on 50 ICLR 2025 papers, multi-label-annotated by 18 domain experts against a taxonomy of six defect categories (plus a non-deficient label). TADDLE decomposes detection into four specialized analysis tools -- Verify, Correct, Complete, and Transform -- orchestrated by an agent; an integrator synthesizes their outputs into binary and multi-label classifications via two-stage semi-supervised learning. Extensive experiments show that TADDLE performs strongly on both binary detection and the multi-label classification task. We release the benchmark and code at https://github.com/AquariusAQ/TADDLE.

CI failure logs are large (median 5k lines, max 200k in this corpus) and noisy. Coding agents that try to debug them depend on an upstream tool to reduce the log to a manageable context, but the field has had no public empirical comparison of which reductions preserve enough evidence for downstream LLM diagnosis. We introduce LogDx-CI, a benchmark that compares 11 context-reduction tools (raw, tail, grep, three RTK modes, two real LLM map-reduce summarizers, three hybrid routers) on 35 real GitHub Actions failure cases, scored by 3 LLM debugger families (Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, OpenAI gpt-5-mini) plus a Sonnet 4.6 tool-using agent. We report three load-bearing findings. (1)~Hybrid grep+tail routers dominate the cost-quality Pareto frontier; the top two methods score 0.670 / 0.666 at $\sim$ $0.03 per case, same-ballpark quality as standalone grep at $4.5\times$ fewer tokens. (2)~In the agent-loop regime, the quality range across reduction tools collapses $7\times$ (single-shot spread 0.42 $\to$ agent-loop spread 0.059); the agent rescues weak contexts via follow-up tool calls. However, cost differences persist: weak contexts force the agent to issue 2--4$\times$ more tool calls to recover. (3)~A cross-family LLM-summary pair (gpt-5-mini summarizer feeding a Claude Haiku debugger) beats the same-family pair by $+0.071$ averaged across four diagnoser variants, falsifying the self-call-bias hypothesis on this task. The gpt-5-mini summarizer is also the agent-loop #1 method (score 0.749) at $0.37$ tool-calls per case and $10\times$ lower reducer cost than the Haiku summarizer ($0.18 vs $1.75 per case). All data, code, per-case bundles, and reproducibility infrastructure are public.

Code review is a critical practice in software engineering, yet the growing scale and frequency of code patches in modern projects, together with the widespread adoption of AI code assistants, make manual review increasingly challenging. Identifying the types of changes within a patch, such as renames, moves, or logic modifications, can substantially improve review efficiency by enabling prioritization, filtering, and automation. However, existing LLM-based approaches to code review have largely focused on summarization and comment generation, leaving structured code reviews underexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic study of using large language models (LLMs) for taxonomy-based labeling of code changes in a code patch. We introduce a two-stage pipeline that assigns labels to diff hunks and then refines them to capture structural relationships and semantic attributes, such as rename propagation and type changes. Our approach employs few-shot prompting to produce language-agnostic and customizable labels, without the engineering overhead of traditional static-analysis pipelines. We evaluate four LLMs across multiple context configurations on a manually curated benchmark of natural and synthetic patches. Our best configuration achieves up to $84\%$ recall and $81\%$ precision, with high accuracy in extracting relational and attribute metadata. These results suggest that LLM-based labeling can effectively complement static analysis by enabling flexible, multilingual, and automation-friendly code review workflows.

AI-assisted code review tools typically operate as generic "expert reviewer" agents, producing homogeneous findings regardless of the analysis type needed. We present a system that constrains AI reviewer behavior through philosophical dispositions -- coherent personality lenses grounded in specific epistemological traditions (Pyrrhonist Skepticism, Navya-Ny=aya logic, Diogenes' Cynicism, Confucian relational ethics) that direct attention to structurally different types of issues. Each disposition is defined apophatically (by what it refuses to do), equipped with a self-monitoring failure mode (hamartia), and orchestrated in sequence by role protocols. We evaluate this system on 50 merged pull requests across 7 repositories spanning 5 programming languages (Python, Go, C++, Java, Terraform), 5 organizations (2 enterprise, 3 open-source), and 2 temporal eras (pre-AI 2020, post-AI 2024--2026). The disposition system achieves 46% convergence with human reviewers (validating signal quality), identifies unique findings at a 75% rate, and produces no findings judged false-positive by the author across 601 total findings (inter-rater agreement was not assessed and remains a limitation). A controlled baseline comparison demonstrates that 51% of disposition findings are not produced by the same model using generic "expert reviewer" prompting, and these unique findings target structural, operational, and logical concerns rather than standard code-level issues. Preliminary cross-model validation (Claude Opus vs.\ GPT Codex 5.3-xhigh) on 3 PRs shows 100% framework-structure adherence with 39% finding-level agreement, suggesting the framework provides real behavioral constraint while preserving model-specific analytical perspective.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference in source code can undermine software system quality. Therefore, inadequate LLM integration coding practices must be documented to help developers mitigate such issues. Following our earlier work on LLM code smells, this paper consolidates and refines the concept by presenting a self-contained taxonomy and a catalog of nine LLM code smells. We also create SpecDetect4LLM, a static source code analysis tool for their detection, and conduct extensive empirical evaluations of its detection effectiveness (precision and recall) as well as the prevalence of LLM code smells across 692 open-source software projects (171,194 source files). Our results show that LLM code smells affect 73.5% of the analyzed systems, with a detection precision of 91.3% and a recall of 71.8%.

As AI agents increasingly contribute to code development and maintenance, there is still limited empirical evidence on the quality and risk characteristics of their changes in real-world projects, particularly for refactoring-oriented contributions. It remains unclear how agent-authored refactoring edits affect maintainability, code quality, and security once merged into GitHub repositories. To address this gap, we conduct an empirical study of Python refactoring pull requests (PRs) from the AIDev dataset. We analyze agentic refactoring PRs using PyQu, an ML-based quality assessment tool for Python, to quantify changes across five quality attributes, and we complement PyQu with domain-independent static analysis (Pylint and Bandit) to measure code quality and security issues before and after each change. Our results show that, on average, agentic commits improve a quality attribute in 22.5% of the studied changes, with usability improving most frequently (36.5%). At the same time, 24.17% of modified files introduce new Pylint issues predominantly convention level violations such as long lines-while 4.7% introduce new Bandit findings. From the observed diffs, we derive a taxonomy of 24 recurring change operations and map them to the lint and security findings they most commonly affect. Despite these mixed outcomes, developer acceptance is high: 73.5% of the analyzed PRs are merged, including cases that introduce new lint or security findings, often alongside the removal of existing issues. Overall, these findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of agentic refactoring, and motivate stronger tool-in-the-loop quality and security gating for AI-driven development workflows.

As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.

Pairwise human preference prediction is central to evaluating code-generation systems, where quality often depends on task-specific trade-offs beyond functional correctness. While rubric-based LLM judges improve interpretability by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, most existing pipelines remain pointwise: they score each response independently and derive preferences by comparing aggregated scores. We show that this design is poorly matched to pairwise code preference prediction and can underperform a strong monolithic judge. We propose CriterAlign, a criterion-centric framework that adapts rubric-based judging to pairwise preference evaluation through direct criterion-level pairwise judgments, tie-driven criterion refinement, swap-consistency filtering, and final pairwise synthesis. We further introduce Human-Preference-Aligned Guidance (HPAG), synthesized offline from training examples by extracting recurring rationale gaps between human preferences and monolithic judge predictions, and injected into the criterion generator, criterion judge, and final judge. On BigCodeReward, CriterAlign improves a Qwen2.5-VL-32B monolithic judge from 60.4% to 66.3% accuracy, with ablations confirming the contributions of pairwise criterion design and HPAG.

Code review has evolved for decades, from informal peer checking to today's pull request (PR) workflows, yet it remains a largely manual and cognitively demanding process. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding assistants has intensified this challenge: while these tools increase code production velocity, they also expand the volume of code requiring review, turning code review into a growing bottleneck. Current AI support in code review remains fragmented, with tools focusing on isolated tasks such as reviewer recommendation, PR description generation, or comment suggestion rather than the end-to-end PR review workflow. We address this gap by treating review effectiveness as an outcome of the full code review lifecycle rather than a single stage, proposing a framework that carries context across stage boundaries. We propose a future vision for code review in which reviewers transition from manual inspectors into supervisory operators of agents. In this vision, staged, AI-powered workflows aim to align the pace of code generation with shared understanding and accountable engineering. In this paper, we review the historical evolution of code review practices, identify challenges in traditional code review systems, and examine the shift driven by large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems. We then present a vision for an AI-powered code review workflow combining specialized agents with human-controlled quality gates. Our framework spans five stages: PR Creation, PR Augmentation, Reviewer Selection, AI-Assisted Code Review, and PR Retrospective, with humans retained at key decision points to preserve judgment, accountability, and team-level understanding. Finally, we identify key adoption challenges and outline research directions for evaluation, governance, and responsible human-AI collaboration.

Semantic code search has been widely adopted in both academia and industry. These approaches embed natural-language queries and code snippets into a shared embedding space and retrieve results based on vector similarity. Despit strong performance on benchmark datasets, they often suffer from poor explainability and generalization. Retrieved code may appear semantically similar yet miss critical functional requirements of the query, while providing no explanation of why the result was retrieved. Moreover, such failures become more severe under distribution shift, where models struggle to generalize to unseen benchmarks. In this work, we propose XSearch, an intrinsically explainable code search framework. Our key insight is that by relying on global embedding similarity, existing retrievers inherently take an inductive view. They learn statistical patterns rather than truly understanding the query's functional requirements. We address this problem by reformulating code search as a deductive concept alignment problem. XSearch (i) identifies functional concepts in the query and (ii) explicitly aligns them with corresponding code statements. This explain-then-predict design produces inherent concept-level explanations and mitigates shortcut learning that harms out-of-distribution generalization. We train an encoder with explicit concept-alignment objectives and perform retrieval through explicit matching between query concepts and code statements. Experiments show that, trained on CodeSearchNet using GraphCodeBERT (125M parameters), XSearch improves performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks from 0.02 to 0.33 (15x) over eight state-of-the-art retrievers, and consistently outperforms both encoder- and decoder-based baselines with up to 7B parameters. A user study demonstrates that concept-alignment explanations enable users to evaluate retrieved results faster and more accurately.

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques are revolutionizing applications across multiple domains, such as healthcare, finance, and customer service. Despite their potential, evaluating RAG systems remains a complex challenge due to the stochastic nature of generated outputs and the intricate interplay between retrieval and generation components. This paper introduces Deepchecks, a comprehensive framework tailored for evaluating RAG applications. Deepchecks' evaluation framework addresses RAG applications evaluation through a multi-faceted approach, root cause analysis and production monitoring. By ensuring alignment with application-specific requirements, Deepchecks framework provides a robust foundation for assessing reliability, relevance, and user satisfaction in RAG systems.

Automated detection of vulnerability-fixing commits (VFCs) is critical for timely security patch deployment, as advisory databases lag patch releases by a median of 25 days and many fixes never receive advisories. We present a comprehensive evaluation of code language model based VFC detection through a unified framework consolidating over 20 fragmented datasets spanning more than 180000 commits. Across over 180 experiments with fine-tuned models from 125 M to 14 B parameters, we find no evidence that models acquire transferable security-relevant code understanding from code changes alone. When commit messages are available, they dominate model attention, and when removed, an attribution analysis shows that enriching diffs with additional intra-procedural semantic context does not shift model attention toward the code changes. Group-stratified evaluation exposes approximately 17% performance drops compared to random splits, while temporal splits on aggregated datasets prove unreliable due to compositional shift in the underlying project distributions. At a false positive rate of 0.5% all fine-tuned code-only models miss over 93% of vulnerabilities. Larger and more diverse training data or generative approaches show preliminary improvements but do not resolve the underlying limitations. To support future research on code-centric VFC detection, we release our unified framework and evaluation suite.

We present Curated Industrial Developer Repository (CIDR), a large-scale dataset of real-world software repositories collected through direct collaboration with 12 industrial partner organizations. The dataset comprises 2,440 repositories spanning 138 programming languages and totalling 373 million lines of code, accompanied by structured per-repository metadata. Unlike existing code corpora derived from public open-source platforms, CIDR consists exclusively of proprietary production codebases contributed under formal data sharing agreements, covering application domains including enterprise web and mobile development, fintech, and custom software consultancy. All repositories were processed through a multi-stage pipeline encompassing structured partner onboarding, two-stage quality selection combining automated metadata filtering with manual code review, and a deterministic anonymization pipeline covering the full version control history. The dataset is intended to support research in code intelligence, software quality analysis, pre-training and fine-tuning of code language models, developer behaviour studies, and construction of agent evaluation benchmarks. Access is provided under a restricted commercial license; details are available at https://fermatix.ai/#Contact.

Iterative self-refinement is a popular inference-time reliability technique, but its effectiveness in code-mode tool use depends heavily on the structure of the feedback signal: unstructured critique helps inconsistently across models, and even revision with real execution feedback improves only modestly. The dominant failures are inter-tool contract violations (wrong output shape, incorrect tool routing, broken argument provenance) that run to completion without raising errors, making runtime feedback insufficient. We introduce RubricRefine, a training-free method for pre-execution contract checking that generates task- and registry-specific rubrics, scores candidate code against explicit contract checks, and iteratively repairs failures before any execution occurs. RubricRefine reaches $0.86$, averaged across seven models, on M3ToolEval with zero execution attempts, improving over prior inference-time baselines at lower latency than rubric-guided reranking. Performance remains flat on the predominantly single-step API-Bank, consistent with the method's reliance on inter-tool contract structure. Results on AppWorld demonstrate that our method maintains an advantage in the multi-turn setting. Because the rubric is derived from the supplied tool documentation, the method's advantage survives incomplete documentation but reverses under incorrect documentation. A rubric-category ablation identifies which rules are load-bearing, and top-bin calibration enables early stopping even where aggregate calibration is poor.

Mechanistic interpretability papers increasingly use causal vocabulary: circuits, mediators, causal abstraction, monosemanticity. Such claims require explicit identification assumptions. A purposive audit of 10 papers across four methodological strands finds no dedicated identification-assumptions section and a recurring pattern: validation metrics such as faithfulness, completeness, monosemanticity, alignment, or ablation effects are reported as causal support without stating the assumptions that make them identifying. A two-human-coder audit on $n=30$ reproduces the direction of the main finding: dedicated identification sections are absent, and validation-metric substitution is common, though exact Dim B/D counts are coding-rule sensitive. The paper proposes a disclosure norm: state whether the claim is causal, name the identification strategy, enumerate assumptions, stress at least one, and explain how conclusions shift if assumptions fail. Validation is not identification.

Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large language model agents excel at bug fixing and code-level refactoring, their ability to repair architectural code smells remains unexplored. We present the first empirical evaluation of LLM agents on architectural code smell repair. We contribute SmellBench, a task orchestration framework that incorporates smell-type-specific optimized prompts and supports iterative multi-step execution, together with a scoring methodology that separately evaluates repair effectiveness, false positive identification, and net codebase impact. We evaluate 11 agent configurations from four model families (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral) on 65 hard-severity architectural smells detected by PyExamine in the Python project scikit-learn, validated against expert judgments. Expert validation reveals that 63.1% of detected smells are false positives, while the best agent achieves a 47.7% resolution rate. Agents identify false positives with up to $κ= 0.94$ expert agreement, but repair aggressiveness and net codebase quality are inversely related: the most aggressive agent introduces 140 new smells. These findings expose a gap between current LLM capabilities in localized code transformations and the architectural understanding needed for cross-module refactoring. SmellBench provides reusable infrastructure for tracking progress on this underexplored dimension of automated software engineering. We release our code and data at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19247588.

Large language models (LLMs) are now largely involved in software development workflows, and the code they generate routinely includes third-party library (TPL) imports annotated with specific version identifiers. These version choices can carry security and compatibility risks, yet they have not been systematically studied. We present the first large-scale measurement study of version-level risk in LLM-generated Python code, evaluating 10 LLMs on PinTrace, a curated benchmark of 1,000 Stack Overflow programming tasks. LLMs tend to specify version identifiers when directly prompted at 26.83%-95.18%, while down to 6.45%-59.19% in creating a manifest file directly. Among the specified versions, 36.70%-55.70% of tasks contain at least one known CVE, and 62.75%-74.51% of them carry Critical or High severity ratings. In 72.27%-91.37% of cases, the associated CVEs were publicly disclosed before the model's knowledge cutoff. The statistics show all models converge on the same small set of risky release versions, indicating a systemic bias rather than isolated model error. Static compatibility rates range from 19.70% to 63.20%, with installation failure as the dominant cause. The dynamic test cases confirm the pattern by 6.49%-48.62% pass rates. Further experiments confirm that these failures are attributable to version selection rather than code quality, and that externally anchored version constraints substantially reduce both vulnerability exposure and compatibility failures. Our findings reveal LLM version selection as a first-class, previously overlooked risk surface in LLM-based development. We disclosed these findings to the community of the evaluated models, and several confirmed the issue. All the code and dataset have been released for open science at https://github.com/dw763j/PinTrace.

Code translation is one of the core capabilities of LLMs. However, evaluating the correctness of translations remains difficult, as commonly used metrics such as BLEU measure only syntactic similarity, disregarding program semantics. We propose a novel evaluation methodology for code translation tasks, emphasizing semantic equivalence over surface-level string similarity. Our approach applies established compiler testing methodology to a new domain, allowing the assessment of an LLM fine-tuned for binary lifting tasks (i.e. decompiling binaries to higher-level representations). We introduce a semantic correctness score, defined as the proportion of translations that produce correct execution outcomes, and demonstrate its application by evaluating LLM-based and heuristic decompilers. Our findings show that LLM-based approaches significantly outperform heuristic ones, while BLEU scores show negligible correlation with semantic correctness (r = -0.127 to 0.354), demonstrating that syntactic metrics fail to predict functional accuracy.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate defective outputs in code generation tasks, ranging from logical bugs to security vulnerabilities. While these generation failures are often treated as model-level limitations, empirical evidence increasingly traces their root causes to imperfections within the training corpora. Yet, the specific mechanisms linking training data quality issues to generated code quality issues remain largely unmapped. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 114 primary studies to investigate how training data quality issues propagate into code generation. We establish a unified taxonomy that categorizes generated code quality issues across nine dimensions and training data quality issues into code and non-code attributes. Based on this taxonomy, we formalize a causal framework detailing 18 typical propagation mapping mechanisms. Furthermore, we synthesize state-of-the-art detection and mitigation techniques across the data, model, and generation lifecycles. The reviewed literature reveals a clear methodological shift: quality assurance is transitioning from reactive, heuristic-based post-generation filtering toward proactive, data-centric governance and closed-loop repair. Finally, we identify open challenges and outline research directions for developing reliable LLMs for code through integrated data curation and continuous evaluation. Our repository is available at https://github.com/SYSUSELab/From-Data-to-Code.

SemEval-2026 Task 13 investigates machine-generated code detection across multiple programming languages and application scenarios, asking participating systems to generalize to unseen languages and domains. This paper describes our participation in Subtask A (binary classification) and explores both pretrained code encoders and lightweight feature-based methods. We design ratio-based features that are less sensitive to snippet length. To support the extraction of descriptiveness-related signals, we use parsing engines and a programming-language classifier. Additionally, we train a separate code-vs-text line classifier to identify raw natural language segments embedded within samples. We combine a shallow decision tree with heuristic rules derived from data analysis to produce the final predictions. Our approach is computationally efficient, requires only CPU resources for training, and achieves near-instant inference time, offering a lightweight alternative to large pretrained models.

This paper describes the system submitted by team \textbf{Archaeology} to SemEval-2026 Task~13 on AI-generated code detection. The shared task consists of three subtasks; we participate in Subtask-A (binary classification: human-written vs.\ AI-generated code) and Subtask-B (11-class attribution of the generating model). Starting from a TF-IDF and Logistic Regression baseline, we fine-tune four pre-trained code models (CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, UniXcoder, and CodeT5+) with separate strategies for each subtask. For Subtask-A, we use leave-one-language-out cross-validation, code augmentation, chunked inference with trimmed-mean aggregation, and threshold calibration on a difficult dataset. For Subtask-B, we use sandwich token packing, class-balanced loss, and multi-seed ensembling with test-time augmentation. Our best submissions obtain macro-F1 scores of 0.737 on Subtask-A (6th/81 teams) and 0.422 on Subtask-B (7th/34 teams).

Source Code Plagiarism Detection (SCPD) plays an important role in maintaining fairness and academic integrity in software engineering education. Code Evaluation Metrics (CEMs) are developed for assessing code generation tasks. However, it remains unclear whether such metrics can reliably detect plagiarism across different levels of modification (L1-L6), increasing in complexity. In this paper, we perform a comparative empirical study using two open-source labelled datasets, ConPlag (raw and template-free versions) and IRPlag. We evaluate five CEMs, namely CodeBLEU, CrystalBLEU, RUBY, Tree Structured Edit Distance (TSED), and CodeBERTScore. The performance is evaluated using threshold-free ranking-based measures to assess overall, per dataset, and per-level plagiarism performance. The results are compared against state-of-the-art (SOTA) Source Code Plagiarism Detection Tools (SCPDTs), JPlag and Dolos. Our findings show that without preprocessing, Dolos achieves the highest overall ranking performance, while among the individual metrics, CrystalBLEU, CodeBLEU, and RUBY outperform JPlag. Performance is strongest at L1 and drops from L4 onward, while CrystalBLEU remains competitive on L6. With preprocessing, CrystalBLEU surpasses Dolos overall. Per dataset, Dolos achieved the best ranking on the ConPlag raw dataset, while CrystalBLEU was the best-performing metric on the remaining datasets. At the plagiarism levels, Dolos remains strongest on L4, while Crystal-BLEU leads most of the remaining difficult levels. These results indicate that CEMs are comparable to dedicated tools in terms of ranking metrics.

Source code and its accompanying comments are complementary yet naturally aligned modalities-code encodes structural logic while comments capture developer intent. However, existing vulnerability detection methods mostly rely on single-modality code representations, overlooking the complementary semantic information embedded in comments and thus limiting their generalization across complex code structures and logical relationships. To address this, we propose MultiVul, a multimodal contrastive framework that aligns code and comment representations through dual similarity learning and consistency regularization, augmented with diverse code-text pairs to improve robustness. Experiments on widely adopted DiverseVul and Devign datasets across four large language models (LLMs) (i.e., DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B, StarCoder2-7B, and CodeLlama-7B) show that MultiVul achieves up to 27.07% F1 improvement over prompting-based methods and 13.37% over code-only Fine-Tuning, while maintaining comparable inference efficiency.

Automated code review (ACR) bots are increasingly used in industrial software development to assist developers during pull request (PR) review. As adoption grows, a key challenge is how to evaluate the usefulness of bot-generated comments reliably and at scale. In practice, such evaluation often relies on developer actions and annotations that are shaped by contextual and organizational factors, complicating their use as objective ground truth. We examine the feasibility and limitations of automating the evaluation of LLM-powered ACR bots in an industrial setting. We analyze an industrial dataset from Beko comprising 2,604 bot-generated PR comments, each labeled by software engineers as fixed/wontFix. Two automated evaluation approaches, G-Eval and an LLM-as-a-Judge pipeline, are applied using both binary decisions and a 0-4 Likert-scale formulation, enabling a controlled comparison against developer-provided labels. Across Gemini-2.5-pro, GPT-4.1-mini, and GPT-5.2, both evaluation strategies achieve only moderate alignment with human labels. Agreement ratios range from approximately 0.44 to 0.62, with noticeable variation across models and between binary and Likert-scale formulations, indicating sensitivity to both model choice and evaluation design. Our findings highlight practical limitations in fully automating the evaluation of ACR bot comments in industrial contexts. Developer actions such as resolving or ignoring comments reflect not only comment quality, but also contextual constraints, prioritization decisions, and workflow dynamics that are difficult to capture through static artifacts. Insights from a follow-up interview with a software engineering director further corroborate that developer labeling behavior is strongly influenced by workflow pressures and organizational constraints, reinforcing the challenges of treating such signals as objective ground truth.

Code review is central to software engineering education but hard to scale in capstone projects due to tight deadlines, uneven peer feedback, and limited prior experience. We investigate an LLM-as-reviewer integrated directly into GitHub pull requests (human-in-the-loop) across two cohorts (more than 100 students, 2023--2024). Using a mixed-methods design -- GitHub data, reflective reports, and a targeted survey -- we examine engagement and responsiveness as behavioral indicators of self-regulated learning processes. Quantitatively, the 2024 cohort produced more iterative activity (1176 vs. 581 PRs), while technical issues observed in 2023 (227 failed AI attempts) dropped to zero after tool and instructional refinements. Despite different adoption levels (93% vs. 50% of teams using the tool), responsiveness was stable: 32% (2023) and 33% (2024) of successfully AI-reviewed PRs were followed by subsequent commits on the same PR. Qualitatively, students used the LLM's structured comments to focus reviews and discuss code quality, while guidance reduced over-reliance. We contribute: (i) an in-workflow design for an AI reviewer that scaffolds learning while mitigating cognitive offloading; (ii) a repeated cross sectional comparison across two cohorts in authentic settings; (iii) a mixed-methods analysis combining objective GitHub metrics with student self-reports; and (iv) evidence-based pedagogical recommendations for responsible, student-led AI-assisted review.

Lean 4 autoformalization has become increasingly popular in recent years, with frontier language models and open-weight autoformalizers now producing valid formalizations of mathematical theorems. However, these evaluations often rely on single canonical phrasings of theorems and rarely probe whether outputs are robust to natural variation in inputs, while prior work has shown that semantically equivalent paraphrases often induce divergent formal outputs. We study the structure of these divergences in Lean 4 by applying deterministic paraphrase rules to datasets of undergraduate and Olympiad-level math problems. Across four frontier models and three open-weight autoformalizers, we find that paraphrase sensitivity is dominated by failures at the code-generation layer, and that these failures are typed differently by dataset. Furthermore, these patterns generalize to open-weight models, showing that state-of-the-art autoformalizers still struggle to generate valid Lean code. Our results provide a failure-mode taxonomy for autoformalization and motivate training-time interventions targeted at specific compilation failures.

We present Code Broker, a multi agent system built on Google s Agent Development Kit ADK that analyses Python source code from individual files, local directory trees, or remote GitHub repositories and generates structured, actionable quality assessment reports. The system realises a hierarchical five agent architecture in which a root orchestrator coordinates a sequential pipeline agent that, in turn, dispatches three specialised agents concurrently a Correctness Assessor, a Style Assessor, and a Description Generator before synthesising their findings through an Improvement Recommender. Reports quantify four quality dimensions correctness, security, style, and maintainability on a normalised scale and are rendered in both Markdown and HTML for integration into diverse developer workflows. Code Broker fuses LLM based semantic reasoning with deterministic static analysis signals from Pylint, employs asynchronous execution with exponential backoff retry logic to improve robustness under transient API failures, and explores lightweight session memory for retaining and querying prior assessment context across runs. We frame this paper as a technical report on system design, prompt engineering, and tool orchestration, and present a preliminary qualitative evaluation on representative Python codebases of varying scale. The results indicate that parallel specialised agents produce readable, developer oriented feedback that complements traditional linting, while also foregrounding current limitations in evaluation depth, security tooling, large repository handling, and the exclusive reliance on in memory persistence. All code and reproducibility materials are publicly available: https://github.com/Samir-atra/agents_intensive_dev.

Qualitative coding relies on a researcher's application of codes to textual data. As coding proceeds across large datasets, interpretations of codes often shift (temporal drift), reducing the credibility of the analysis. Existing Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) tools provide support for data management but offer no workflow for real-time detection of these drifts. We present Co-Refine, an AI-augmented qualitative coding platform that delivers continuous, grounded feedback on coding consistency without disrupting the researcher's workflow. The system employs a three-stage audit pipeline: Stage 1 computes deterministic embedding-based metrics for mathematical consistency; Stage 2 grounds LLM verdicts within $\pm0.15$ of the deterministic scores; and Stage 3 produces code definitions from previous patterns to create a deepening feedback loop. Co-Refine demonstrates that deterministic scoring can effectively constrain LLM outputs to produce reliable, real-time audit signals for qualitative analysis.

Practitioners have reported a directional pattern in AI-assisted code generation: AI-generated code tends to fail quietly, preserving the appearance of functionality while degrading or concealing guarantees. This paper introduces the Reward-Shaped Failure Hypothesis - the proposal that this pattern may reflect an artifact of optimization through human feedback rather than a random distribution of bugs. We define failure truthfulness as the property that a system's observable outputs accurately represent its internal success or failure state. We then present AIRA (AI-Induced Risk Audit), a deterministic 15-check inspection framework designed to detect failure-untruthful patterns in code. We report results from three studies: (1) an anonymized enterprise environment audit, (2) a balanced 600-file public corpus pilot, and (3) a strict matched-control replication comparing 955 AI-attributed files against 955 human-control files. In the final replication, AI-attributed files show 0.435 high-severity findings per file versus 0.242 in human controls (1.80x). The effect is consistent across JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript, with strongest concentration in exception-handling-related patterns. These findings are consistent with a directional skew toward fail-soft behavior in AI-assisted code. AIRA is designed for governance, compliance, and safety-critical systems where fail-closed behavior is required.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly extended at runtime via skill packages, structured natural-language instruction bundles loaded from a well-known directory. Community install tooling and registries exist, but two gaps persist: no public tool scores skill packages against Anthropic's published format specification, and no mechanism bundles related skills with the shared context they need to remain mutually coherent. We present Skilldex, a package manager and registry for agent skill packages addressing both gaps. The two novel contributions are: (1) compiler-style format conformance scoring against Anthropic's skill specification, producing line-level diagnostics on description specificity, frontmatter validity, and structural adherence; and (2) the skillset abstraction, a bundled collection of related skills with shared assets (vocabulary files, templates, reference documents) that enforce cross-skill behavioral coherence. Skilldex also provides supporting infrastructure: a three-tier hierarchical scope system, a human-in-the-loop agent suggestion loop, a metadata-only community registry, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The system is implemented as a TypeScript CLI (skillpm / spm) with a Hono/Supabase registry backend, and is open-source.

Large Language Models are increasingly used as judges to evaluate code artifacts when exhaustive human review or executable test coverage is unavailable. LLM-judge is increasingly relevant in agentic software engineering workflows, where it can help rank candidate solutions and guide patch selection. While attractive for scale, current practice lacks a principled account of reliability and bias: repeated evaluations of the same case can disagree; small prompt edits can swing outcomes; and seemingly semantics-preserving, human-equivalent perturbations may elicit divergent verdicts. This paper studies LLM-as-a-Judge for code through a measurement-first lens. We analyze two pointwise judging regimes across code generation, code repair task, and test generation, and we systematically probe prompt-induced biases. Our study considers difficulty levels for repeated runs and controlled prompt interventions that isolate one presentation cue at a time, and it evaluates judges using consistency and sensitivity to bias. We find that judge decisions are highly sensitive to prompt biases even when the underlying code snippet is unchanged. Across all three tasks, several biases systematically shift preferences toward the option favored by the prompt, improving accuracy when that option aligns with the gold answer but substantially reducing it otherwise. In some settings, these effects are large enough to change task-level conclusions and alter relative model rankings. These findings show that reported judge performance may reflect prompt artifacts rather than stable assessment ability, posing a direct threat to the validity and reproducibility of code evaluation. We therefore argue that LLM-as-a-Judge studies should report bias sensitivity alongside accuracy and incorporate explicit controls to support more trustworthy model comparison in software engineering.

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has made distinguishing AI-generated code from human-written code a critical challenge with implications for academic integrity, code quality assurance, and software security. We present LLMSniffer, a detection framework that fine-tunes GraphCodeBERT using a two-stage supervised contrastive learning pipeline augmented with comment removal preprocessing and an MLP classifier. Evaluated on two benchmark datasets - GPTSniffer and Whodunit - LLMSniffer achieves substantial improvements over prior baselines: accuracy increases from 70% to 78% on GPTSniffer (F1: 68% to 78%) and from 91% to 94.65% on Whodunit (F1: 91% to 94.64%). t-SNE visualizations confirm that contrastive fine-tuning yields well-separated, compact embeddings. We release our model checkpoints, datasets, codes and a live interactive demo to facilitate further research.

Existing research on large language models (LLMs) for automated code compliance has primarily focused on performance, treating the models as black boxes and overlooking how training decisions affect their interpretive behavior. This paper addresses this gap by employing a perturbation-based attribution analysis to compare the interpretive behaviors of LLMs across different fine-tuning strategies such as full fine-tuning (FFT), low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and quantized LoRA fine-tuning, as well as the impact of model scales which include varying LLM parameter sizes. Our results show that FFT produces attribution patterns that are statistically different and more focused than those from parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Furthermore, we found that as model scale increases, LLMs develop specific interpretive strategies such as prioritizing numerical constraints and rule identifiers in the building text, albeit with performance gains in semantic similarity of the generated and reference computer-processable rules plateauing for models larger than 7B. This paper provides crucial insights into the explainability of these models, taking a step toward building more transparent LLMs for critical, regulation-based tasks in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry.

We present AgentGA, a framework that evolves autonomous code-generation runs by optimizing the agent seed: the task prompt plus optional parent archives that initialize a fresh workspace. The outer loop searches over these reusable starting conditions rather than editing code directly. Each generation launches a fresh autonomous run in an isolated workspace, while selected parent archives provide inherited artifacts that descendants can inspect and reuse. AgentGA couples a population-level genetic algorithm with long-horizon agents; selection uses deterministic 1:1 elite tournaments and operator allocation is adapted online with a modified Hedge controller. We instantiate the approach for tabular AutoML on the 16-competition Weco-Kaggle Lite benchmark. Across the full benchmark, AgentGA averages 71.90% Exceeds % of Human versus 51.38% for the AIDE reference, winning 15/16 competitions. Within AgentGA runs, descendants conditioned on inherited parent archives win 51.9% of 1,680 parent-child tournaments versus 8.6% for de novo proposals. These results support agent-seed optimization as a practical design choice for autonomous code-search systems.