Software Engineering Agents

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Overview

Software engineering agents use language models to work on tasks such as fixing repository issues, writing tests, building projects, reviewing code, and modernizing software. Common approaches combine planning and code retrieval with tools that run builds and tests; other systems use multiple specialized agents, repository memory, reinforcement learning, or formal verification. Performance is often evaluated on repository-level benchmarks such as SWE-bench, alongside terminal tasks and real-world settings that test build success, design constraints, and behavior over multiple steps. Agents can solve many tasks, but dependable performance remains difficult: passing tests may not mean a patch follows project intent, and greater autonomy or more agents can increase cost, regressions, and oversight demands.

Latest papers

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349 papers71 papers in the last four weeks, up 103% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

  1. Agentic process evidence

    Oct 29, 2026Yuval Kainan, Carmit HershmanAI Agent GovernanceAI Agent Auditing

    JFrog

  2. Nemotron 3.5 Super and Lightning: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Models for Agentic AI

    Oct 28, 2026NVIDIA, :, Aastha Jhunjhunwala +556LLM Agent TrainingMixture-of-Experts Language Models

  3. FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features

    Oct 27, 2026Yunlong Wang, Alyssa Wu, Cuiyun Gao +3Coding Agent BenchmarksSoftware Engineering

    Hunyuan Team, Tencent · The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  4. Spine: Compiling Subtask Trees into Structured Context for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

    Oct 27, 2026Jiahong Xiang, Kunqiu Chen, Lingming Zhang +1Long-Horizon LLM AgentsSoftware Engineering Agents

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

  5. The View from Nowhere: Population-Centered Agent Evolution

    Oct 27, 2026Shuo Yan, Ningning Hou, Haoyu He +2LLM Agent Self-ImprovementSoftware Engineering Agents

    Macquarie University · Monash University

  6. InfraDev: Can Coding Agents Develop AI Infrastructure, and How Can We Tell?

    Oct 27, 2026Yangshen Deng, Jiaqi Ruan, Yeqi Huang +3AI Coding AgentsCoding Agent Benchmarks

    University of Edinburgh · Tencent Hunyuan

  7. Agent or Human? Detecting Commits by AI Coding Agents in the Absence of Authorship Signatures

    Oct 26, 2026Kosei Horikawa, Hao Li, Yutaro Kashiwa +5Authorship AttributionAI Coding Agents

    Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan · Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada · École de technologie supérieure - Québec University, Montréal, Canada

  8. Stratum: Repository Memory for Coding Agents Beyond the Context Window

    Oct 26, 2026Yuvraj Sehgal, Mahsa Panahandeh, Naser Ezzati-JivanLLM Agent MemoryMemory Management for LLM Agents

    Department of Computer Science, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  9. Hierarchical Skill Evolution for Coding Agent

    Oct 26, 2026Jun Gao, Yun Peng, Changhai Zhou +10LLM Agent Skill LearningSoftware Engineering Agents

  10. The Hidden Costs of Forgetting: A Study of Trajectory Deletion in Software Engineering Agents

    Oct 26, 2026Fernando Vallecillos-Ruiz, Islem Bouzenia, Michael Pradel +1Context Compaction for LLM AgentsSoftware Engineering Agents

    Simula Research Laboratory, Norway · CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany

  11. RepoTrace: Improving Requirement Tracing in Multi-Round Agent Interactions

    Oct 26, 2026Huanyu Liu, Yezheng Cheng, Jinliang You +5Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Reliability

    Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education; School of Computer Science, Peking University · Xidian University · School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University

  12. From GPU to TPU with Coding Agents: What Works, What Fails, and What It Costs?

    Oct 25, 2026Hui Sun, Anderson Uchôa, Wesley K. G. AssunçãoSoftware Engineering AgentsCoding Agent Benchmarks

    North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, USA · Federal University of Cear´a Itapaj´e, Cear´a, Brazil

  13. SWE-Ladder: Learning to Localize, Reproduce, and Patch via Progressive Privileged Self-Distillation

    Oct 24, 2026Xudong Cai, Zhengxi Lu, Yuchen Yan +4Software Engineering AgentsRepository-Level Program Repair

    Zhejiang University

  14. Contract-Based Agentic Systems Engineering: Delegation as Quotient for Assured System Design

    Oct 23, 2026Sai Sandeep Damera, Ryan Matheu, John S. BarasRequirements EngineeringSoftware Engineering Agents

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

  15. Reimagining Enterprise RAG for Multi-Agent Systems: A Knowledge Layer That Organizes Before It Retrieves

    Oct 23, 2026Garima Agrawal, Prasun Das, Akshay Sarvade +9Agentic RAGInformation Retrieval

    Cognizant, Plano, Texas, USA

  16. Can AI Agents Help Robotic Engineers? Lessons from Two Focus Days in Industry

    Oct 23, 2026Salim Fares, Steffen HerboldAI Coding AgentsSoftware Engineering Agents

    University of Passau Passau, Germany

  17. Speculative Forking: Turning Idle Wait into Parallel Exploration for Repository Environment Setup

    Oct 23, 2026Yuling Shi, Mingchu Zhong, Zhensu Sun +8Software Engineering AgentsLLM Agent Efficiency

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Singapore Management University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +4

  18. Superintelligent Software Engineering: Governance That Scales with Capability

    Oct 22, 2026Mohammad Mehdi GholinejadSoftware EngineeringAI Agent Governance

    OSTEON Labs

  19. Compact-Bench: Measuring What Context Compaction Costs Long-Horizon Coding Agents

    Oct 22, 2026Ruopei Sun, Jianfeng Cai, Kangwen Zhao +2Context Compaction for LLM AgentsLLM Context Compression

    University of Science and Technology of China

  20. FrontierCS 2: A Benchmark for Computer Science R&D

    Oct 21, 2026Qiuyang Mang, Wenhao Chai, Runyuan He +58Scientific Agent BenchmarksCoding Agent Benchmarks

  21. VeeReview: Measuring Build-Verify Pairs in Agent-Authored Pull Requests from a V-Model Perspective

    Oct 21, 2026Gabriel Dautovi, Jie JW WuAutomated Code ReviewAutomated Agent Evaluation

    Department of Computer Science, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, United States

  22. Where Should a Stuck Agent Spend Its Next Tokens? Causal Attribution of Inference-Time Resources

    Oct 20, 2026Saiyue Lyu, Jerrold Huang, Yunbei Zhang +4Inference-Time Compute AllocationSoftware Engineering Agents

    University of British Columbia · University of Toronto · Tulane University +2

  23. Toward Agentic AI for the 6G Physical Layer: From Algorithm Discovery to Verified Baseband Silicon

    Oct 20, 2026Eric Mittag, Lukas Brechtel, Maximilian Stark +1Hardware-Software Co-Design6G Networks

    German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, Germany · CTO System Innovation, NXP Semiconductors, Hamburg, Germany · RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany

  24. RELAY: Scaling Historical Build Restoration through Rule Reuse and Agentic Repair

    Oct 20, 2026Olivier Nourry, Yoshiki HigoSoftware Engineering AgentsAutomated Program Repair

    The University of Osaka, Osaka, Japan

  25. MemDev-Bench: Does Memory Help Code Agents?Benchmarking Memory Systems over Real Repository Histories

    Oct 20, 2026Guorui Chen, Tao Liu, Zhenzhen Huang +9Memory Agent BenchmarksMemory-Augmented Agents

    Southeast University, Nanjing, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · MemoraX AI, Shenzhen, China

  26. TEX: Test-Time Scaling Testing Agents via Execution-based Cross-Validation

    Oct 19, 2026Akash Gokul, Srijan Bansal, Yingbo Zhou +1Test-Time ScalingSoftware Engineering Agents

    NVIDIA · Salesforce Research · Recursive

  27. From Code to Playable Systems: CEGame-Bench for Long-Horizon Game Creation Agents

    Oct 19, 2026Zixuan Dong, Yanghai Wang, Hanyan Bian +8Automated Game TestingSoftware Engineering Agents

    National University of Defense Technology · Nanjing University · The University of Tokyo +2

  28. StopLoss: Teaching Agents to Predict Failure and Stop Early

    Oct 18, 2026Jiarong Liang, Xueguang Ma, Dongfu Jiang +3Early StoppingAI Agent Monitoring

    University of Waterloo

  29. SWE-Bench Pro V2: A Cleaner, Harder-to-Game Coding Benchmark

    Oct 16, 2026Soham Dan, Jeff Da, Sanyam Bhutani +8Coding Agent BenchmarksSoftware Engineering Benchmarks

    Scale AI · Reflection AI

  30. World of SWECraft: Agent Collaboration at Scale via Simulated Software Worlds

    Oct 16, 2026Shannon Zejiang Shen, Yapei Chang, Qiyao Liang +13Multi-Agent CollaborationSoftware Engineering Agents

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · University of Maryland, College Park · University of Washington +3