Software Engineering Benchmarks

Overview

Software engineering benchmarks measure whether AI systems can perform tasks such as fixing repository-level bugs, writing tests, reviewing code, and building or evolving applications. They commonly use real repositories, executable environments, hidden tests, and simulated user interactions, with newer evaluations also examining agent trajectories, tool use, and coordination. The field is moving beyond one-shot code generation toward long-running workflows and broader measures of quality, including performance, security, design constraints, and maintainability. A central challenge is making results reliable and representative: tests can miss valid solutions or accept flawed ones, and scores can depend heavily on task selection, evaluation rules, and agent setup.

Latest papers

157 papers32 papers in the last four weeks, up 113% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jun 16, 2026

Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering

Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness -- a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on.
Jun 13, 2026

CODA-BENCH: Can Code Agents Handle Data-Intensive Tasks?

Advanced agents are increasingly demonstrating the potential to operate as autonomous engineers, creating a growing demand for evaluation benchmarks that capture the complexity of real-world development. Such environments typically involve both complex code and large-scale data (i.e., file system). However, existing benchmarks usually evaluate code-centric or data-centric capabilities in isolation, leaving a clear gap with real development scenarios. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing CODA-BENCH, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate code and data intelligence in a data-intensive environment. We construct a data-intensive Linux sandbox based on the Kaggle ecosystem (containing hundreds of datasets), where agents must actively explore complex file hierarchies to identify relevant resources and generate code for data-driven analytical tasks. CODA-BENCH comprises 1,009 tasks spanning 31 communities, with each task environment containing an average of 980 files, simulating realistic data scale and noise. Evaluations of advanced agents reveal that even top-performing systems struggle to effectively integrate data discovery with code execution, achieving a success rate of only 61.1%. These results highlight a substantial gap in current agentic capabilities for data-intensive tasks and point to promising directions for future research.
Jun 10, 2026

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

The software engineering capabilities of general-purpose agent harnesses remain underexplored, and existing benchmarks offer limited support for comparing these harnesses under consistent conditions. To address this gap, we introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a unified benchmark that enables researchers to systematically assess the capabilities and efficiency of general-purpose harnesses on software engineering tasks. The benchmark contains 350 real-world GitHub issue-resolution instances across eight programming languages and 43 repositories and provides a shared adapter protocol to align task inputs, outputs, and execution environments across harnesses. Experiments show that general-purpose harnesses can effectively resolve real-world software issues and that their success rates and resource consumption vary substantially even when the underlying model is held fixed. To lower evaluation costs and support faster debugging and iteration, we also provide Claw-SWE-Bench Lite, an 80-instance subset designed to preserve the key evaluation properties of the full benchmark. We hope this benchmark will help researchers better evaluate and understand the performance of general-purpose harnesses on software engineering tasks and guide the development of more capable and efficient harnesses. The data is available at https://github.com/opensquilla/claw-swe-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/TokenRhythm/Claw-SWE-Bench.
Jun 5, 2026

SWE-Explore: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Explore Repositories

Repository-level coding benchmarks such as SWE-bench have driven a rapid surge in the capabilities of coding agents. Yet they usually treat coding tasks as a holistic, binary prediction problem (e.g., resolved or unresolved), neglecting fine-grained agent capabilities such as repository understanding, context retrieval, code localization, and bug diagnosis. In this paper, we introduce SWE-Explore, a benchmark that isolates the evaluation of repository exploration, a critical capability of coding agents. Given a repository and an issue, SWE-Explore asks an explorer to return a ranked list of relevant code regions under a fixed line budget. SWE-Explore covers 848 issues across 10 programming languages and 203 open-source repositories. For each instance, we derive line-level ground truth from independent agent trajectories that successfully solved the same issue, distilling the specific code regions their solution paths actually consulted. We evaluate exploration along coverage, ranking, and context-efficiency dimensions, showing that these metrics strongly track downstream repair behavior. Across a broad set of retrieval methods, general coding agents, and specialized localizers, we find that agentic explorers form a clear tier above classical retrieval. While file-level localization is already strong for modern methods, line-level coverage and efficient ranking remain the key axes differentiating state-of-the-art explorers.
Jun 5, 2026

SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?

AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments. Yet current agent benchmarks largely evaluate short-form tasks, such as single pull requests, small tickets, or 5-10 minute exercises, limiting our ability to measure agents' capabilities in planning, long-context understanding, and memory use. We introduce SWE-Marathon, a benchmark of 20 long-horizon tasks spanning software engineering and adjacent technical domains. Each task consists of a unique executable environment, a human-written reference solution, and a multi-layer verification suite. Logged agent attempts average 27.2M total tokens, making SWE-Marathon substantially longer-horizon than existing SWE and command-line agent benchmarks. Current frontier coding agents solve fewer than 30% of tasks. Failures often arise from poor self-verification, self-reported infeasibility, and premature termination. We also observe reward-hacking behavior in 13.8% of rollouts, where agents attempt to exploit the environment or verifier to bypass the intended workflow. SWE-Marathon includes adversarial review of test suites and execution environments, as well as multi-layer checks designed to prevent shortcut solutions. We release SWE-Marathon, evaluation code, and agent trajectories at https://swe-marathon.org/.
Jun 4, 2026

TensorBench: Benchmarking Coding Agents on a Compiler-Based Tensor Framework

Repository-level coding benchmarks face a trade-off between task difficulty and evaluation reliability: tasks that challenge frontier models often involve large codebases with incomplete test coverage, while human review does not scale. We introduce TensorBench, a benchmark of 199 feature-addition and refactoring tasks on an open-source compiler-based tensor framework that extends PyTorch with first-class support for dense and sparse tensors. Tasks cover new sparse formats, dense optimization passes, IR transformations, scheduler changes, runtime components, and high-level numerical operators. TensorBench grades each run by applying the agent's patch and running the framework's test suite, which includes the pre-existing randomized regression tests and any tests the agent adds. For feature-addition tasks, a pass means that the patched repository preserves the tested pre-existing behavior and satisfies the agent-added checks for the requested feature. We evaluate seven coding agents spanning three frontier model families and one open-weight model. Pass rates under this criterion range from 64.8%64.8\% for the strongest agent to 22.1%22.1\% for the weakest. Agents pass different subsets of tasks: pairwise Cohen's κκ ranges from −0.07-0.07 to 0.430.43, with κ=0.05κ= 0.05 for the two strongest agents.
Jun 2, 2026

RealClawBench: Live OpenClaw Benchmarks from Real Developer-Agent Sessions

Agent benchmarks should reflect what users actually ask deployed agents to do, yet existing benchmarks often miss key realism properties of real developer-agent sessions. We introduce RealClawBench, a live benchmark framework built from real OpenClaw sessions to capture the distribution, diversity, and real-world difficulty of deployed agent use. Real user requests are challenging to benchmark because they often depend on local execution environments, involve implicit or underspecified intent, and require nontrivial verification. RealClawBench addresses these challenges with two core mechanisms: reconstructed execution environments and deterministic verifiable scorers, which together convert real sessions into reproducible, automatically scored tasks. The resulting release contains 281 executable tasks sampled from a much larger real-session pool while preserving the source distribution, with maximum final-vs-source Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.0448. Evaluating 14 contemporary models shows that the best system solves only 65.8% of tasks, revealing substantial headroom on realistic developer-agent workloads. By turning real deployed sessions into controlled evaluation instances, RealClawBench provides a practical path toward benchmarks that better measure agent capability in actual use. Code is available at:https://anonymous.4open.science/r/real-claw-bench-582B.
Jun 1, 2026

Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks

Coding-agent benchmarks evaluate whether a single uninterrupted agent can resolve a repository issue. Real software work is messier: tasks are interrupted, reassigned, reviewed, and resumed from partial states left by another agent or engineer. We study this missing dimension through handoff debt: the rediscovery cost imposed when a predecessor's work is opaque or incomplete. Our takeover protocol interrupts a coding agent at deterministic handoff points, freezes the repository, and evaluates successor agents under four handoff views: repository state only, raw trace, summary notes, and structured notes. Across 75 source tasks, the protocol generates 181 handoff-point tasks and 724 takeover runs per successor model. Across three successor models, context-bearing handoffs reduce median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63% relative to repository-only takeover. Solved-rate effects are smaller and model-dependent, but efficiency gains are consistent. These findings suggest that coding-agent evaluation should report not only whether a task is solved, but also how costly that work is for another agent to resume.
May 29, 2026

TraceGraph: Shared Decision Landscapes for Diagnosing and Improving Agent Trajectories

Agent benchmarks increasingly record rich interaction trajectories, yet evaluation often reduces each rollout to a pass rate or reward score. We introduce TraceGraph, a graph-based framework that turns released multi-model agent trajectories into shared decision landscapes. For each task, TraceGraph builds a graph over observable action-observation states from pooled rollouts before model identity is introduced. It then overlays outcome-informed productive cores and trap regions, and summarizes each rollout with three events: Access, Trap exposure, and Repair. Across trajectories spanning five benchmark splits, TraceGraph profiles reveal navigation differences hidden by aggregate scores and show that splits differ in whether they reward avoiding traps or recovering from them. The same TraceGraph landscape also motivates a trap-aware recovery pipeline for SWE-bench: aruntime detector fires on states matching historical trap regions, then lightweight continuation policies are evaluated from the same prefix. On fired states, the best pooled single-factor policy raises official resolved rate from 40.4% to 43.5% on the per-provider fired subset and from 41.0% to 44.8% on common-fired instances, with provider-specific active components. Overall, TraceGraph provides a process vocabulary for asking what agent benchmarks test, where models diverge on a shared landscape, and how failure regions can guide downstream improvement.
May 28, 2026

SpecBench: Evaluating Specification-Level Reasoning for Software Engineering LLM Agents

Software engineering (SWE) agents are transitioning from code generation to full software development lifecycle automation. A critical phase in this lifecycle is specification design: transforming initial proposals into carefully considered requirements through expert review. Existing benchmarks such as SWE-Bench are implementation-focused by measuring the agent's ability to generate code given fixed, precise design requirements. This formulation assumes specifications are correct and complete. In real-world complex and critical software systems, initial specifications are often incomplete and flawed, requiring extensive expert reviews and revisions before being accepted for implementation. To fill this gap, we introduce SpecBench to evaluate specification-level reasoning: the ability to generate complete, unambiguous, consistent, and correct system specifications. SpecBench tasks are derived from the Request for Comments (RFC) process used by mature open-source projects. For each task, an agent is given an initial design proposal, the project codebase, and all past project RFC discussions. The agent is tasked with identifying specification deficiencies: omissions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, or incorrect assumptions in the initial proposal. We evaluate predictions against critiques raised by expert maintainers during historical RFC reviews. SpecBench contains tasks from 5 diverse repositories: Kubernetes, React, Rust, TVM, and vLLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art SWE agents on SpecBench, analyzing their capacity to reason about system design without execution feedback. The best performing agent, GPT-5.4, achieves 44.4% accuracy.
May 28, 2026

Code-QA-Bench: Separating Code Reasoning from Documentation Memorization in Repository-Level QA

We present Code-QA-Bench, a fully automated framework for synthesizing repository-level code understanding benchmarks that separates genuine code comprehension from documentation recall and pretraining memorization. The framework makes two methodological contributions: (1) an answer-first generation pipeline where a tool-equipped agent explores source code to produce verified gold answers before deriving questions, ensuring every task is grounded in real code structure; and (2) a three-condition experimental design evaluating agents under closed-book (no repository), code-only (documentation removed), and documented (full repository) conditions, with deltas directly quantifying documentation utility and memorization. We generate 528 code-derivable and 100 doc-dependent tasks across 10 Python repositories from SWE-Bench, scored by an LLM judge on accuracy, completeness, and specificity. Experiments on four frontier models reveal that code access is the dominant factor (+0.23 mean gain over closed-book), documentation provides modest additional benefit (+0.071 on doc-dependent tasks), and code-only ≈\approx documented on code-derivable tasks, validating the design. The framework is open-source and applicable to any well-documented Python repository.
May 25, 2026

Automated Benchmark Auditing for AI Agents and Large Language Models

Modern AI benchmarks operate at a complexity that outpaces traditional verification methods. Tasks authored by domain experts often contain implicit assumptions, incomplete environment specifications, and brittle evaluation logic that human annotation cannot reliably catch. We introduce Auto Benchmark Audit (ABA), an agentic framework that systematically audits individual benchmark tasks, uncovering issues such as hidden environment dependencies, specification gaps, and limited grading logic. We run ABA on a collection of frontier LLM benchmarks and previous NeurIPS publications, totaling 168 benchmarks across nine domains. Across this corpus, ABA identifies critical issues including ambiguous task design, execution environment conflicts, and incorrect ground truths in over 25.7% of the evaluated tasks. The precision of these automated audits is validated by expert review and independent third-party reports such as upstream PRs. Crucially, we demonstrate that these problematic tasks severely distorts capability assessments for agents and LLMs: filtering out these tasks with issues shifts model rankings and increases average performance on SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2 by 9.9% and 9.6%, respectively. We release the agentic tool and all task annotations to support the future development of frontier benchmarks.
May 25, 2026

RepoMirage: Probing Repository Context Reasoning in Code Agents with Perturbations

Code agents are currently having skillful performance on repository-level software engineering benchmarks, but it remains unclear whether success on end-to-end tasks such as issue resolution truly reflects repository context reasoning, the ability to identify the task-relevant information across multiple files and reason over the relations among them. To investigate this question, we introduce RepoMirage, a two-stage evaluation suite built on SWE-Bench Verified that adopts perturbation as a diagnostic tool to increase the demand for context reasoning by transforming how the repository is exposed. First, RepoMirage-Perturb applies three types of semantics-preserving repository-level perturbations, revealing a clear performance drop when correct solving requires broader context access. RepoMirage-Extend further turns perturbation-targeted structural bottlenecks into explicit tasks beyond issue resolution, where the average performance declines from 66.8% in the original setting to 25.3%, indicating a significant deficiency in repository context reasoning. Further trajectory analysis reveals an exploration drift, where agents access broader repository context but fail to turn it into effective structure information. Motivated by this observation, we propose RepoAnchor, a structure-first prototype workflow that separates repository exploration from downstream problem solving, and show that explicit structural scaffolding yields notable gains. These results uncover an previously overlooked gap in repository context reasoning for code agents and suggest that stronger structure-aware methods are potential to improve them.
May 22, 2026

EvoCode-Bench: Evaluating Coding Agents in Multi-Turn Iterative Interactions

Coding agents are increasingly used as iterative development partners, but most benchmarks still evaluate one specification followed by one final assessment. This leaves out a basic question: can an agent keep its own codebase working as requirements change? We introduce EvoCode-Bench, a benchmark of 26 stateful coding tasks and 227 evaluated rounds. Each task preserves the agent's workspace for 5-15 rounds, states requirements through observable behavior, and uses cumulative executable tests to check new requirements and still-active prior ones. We evaluate 13 coding agents with two metrics: MT@4, a four-attempt fail-stop multi-round score, and SR, a single-round score from a reference-completed prior state. For most agents, SR exceeds MT@4 by 22-40 points. The gap also changes rankings: the highest-SR agent (78.9) ranks only third in persistent execution (44.0 MT@4). Even the strongest agents achieve only about 50% success on multi-turn metrics, and aggregate pass rate drops below half of round-1 performance by round 5. Failure analysis shows tier-dependent behavior: weaker agents fail early, while stronger agents survive long enough to expose specification-tracking and regression failures. We release the benchmark data and Harbor multi-turn infrastructure.
May 21, 2026

SWE-Mutation: Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Suites in Software Engineering?

Evaluating software engineering capabilities has become a core component of modern large language models (LLMs); however, the key bottleneck hindering further scaling lies not in the scarcity of high-quality solutions, but in the lack of high-quality test suites. Test suites are indispensable both for synthesizing program repair trajectories and for providing precise feedback signals in reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, due to the high cost and difficulty of annotation, high-quality test suites have long been hard to obtain, while those automatically generated by LLMs tend to be superficial and lack sufficient discriminative power. As a first step toward constructing high-quality test suites, we introduce SWE-Mutation, a benchmark for evaluating LLM-generated test suites. The benchmark characterizes test suites by introducing systematically mutated solutions that attempt to ``fool'' the test suites and pass validation. We further propose an agentic, language-agnostic framework for automatically generating complex mutants. Our benchmark consists of 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and includes a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. Experiments on seven LLMs reveal that even DeepSeek-V3.1 achieves only 10.20% verification and 36.15% detection rates, highlighting the inadequacy of current LLMs. Additionally, our agentic mutation strategy enhances realism, reducing average detection rates from 71.04% to 39.81% compared to conventional methods. These findings expose persistent deficiencies in the ability of current LLMs to generate reliable and discriminative test suites.
May 20, 2026

SpecBench: Measuring Reward Hacking in Long-Horizon Coding Agents

As long-horizon coding agents produce more code than any developer can review, oversight collapses onto a single surface: the automated test suite. Reward hacking naturally arises in this setup, as the agent optimizes for passing tests while deviating from the users true goal. We study this reward hacking phenomenon by decompose software engineering tasks into three parts: (i) a natural language description of the specification (ii) visible validation tests that exercise specified features in isolation, and (iii) held-out tests that compose those same features to simulate real-world usage. Based on the specification and the visible validation test suites, a genuine agent would be able to generate a solution that can also pass all of the held-out tests. Therefore we use the gap in pass rates on these two suites to quantify reward hacking. Based on this methodology, we introduce SpecBench, a benchmark comprising 30 systems-level programming tasks ranging from short horizon tasks like building a JSON parser to ultra long horizon tasks like building an entire OS kernel from scratch. Large-scale experiments reveal a consistent pattern: while every frontier agent saturates the visible suite, reward hacking persists, with smaller models exhibiting larger gaps on holdout suites. The gap also scales sharply with task length: it grows by 28 percentage points for every tenfold increase in code size. Failures range from subtle feature isolation to deliberate exploits, including a 2,900-line hash-table "compiler" that memorizes test inputs. SpecBench offers a principled testbed for measuring whether coding agents build genuine working systems or merely game the test suites developers hand them.
May 17, 2026

WebGameBench: Requirement-to-Application Evaluation for Coding Agents via Browser-Native Games

Coding agents are increasingly used as application builders, yet many evaluations still focus on source code, repository-level tests, or intermediate traces rather than the delivered application. We introduce WebGameBench, a requirement-to-application benchmark that evaluates whether coding agents can turn a frozen Structured WebGame Specification into a browser-accessible game. Browser-native games provide a compact but behavior-dense testbed: even simple games require coordinated input handling, spatial mapping, rule execution, state transitions, terminal conditions, restart behavior, and visible feedback. In WebGameBench, each generated artifact is built, served, and exposed as a browser-accessible application under a unified deployment protocol. A runtime evaluator then interacts with the delivered game in a real browser and assigns a three-way label: EXCELLENT, USABLE, or UNUSABLE. On a human-reviewed subset, the runtime label is broadly aligned with human gameplay review under the Usable-rate criterion. Across 111 tasks, 12 coding agents, and 14 evaluation configurations, WebGameBench separates current systems: the best configuration reaches a 76.9% usable rate but only a 20.2% excellent rate. This gap shows that crossing the minimum playable-delivery threshold is still far from complete requirement satisfaction. To our knowledge, WebGameBench is the first requirement-to-application benchmark for browser-native game delivery that validates delivered-application runtime labels against independent human gameplay review under the Usable-rate criterion.
May 17, 2026

SaaSBench: Exploring the Boundaries of Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Enterprise SaaS Engineering

As autonomous coding agents become capable of handling increasingly long-horizon tasks, they have gradually demonstrated the potential to complete end-to-end software development. Although existing benchmarks have recently evolved from localized code editing to from-scratch project generation, they remain confined to structurally simplified, single-stack applications. Consequently, they fail to capture the heterogeneous environments, full-stack orchestration, and system-level complexity of real enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) systems, leaving a critical gap in assessing agents under realistic engineering constraints. To fill this gap, we introduce SaaSBench, the first benchmark designed to explore the boundaries of AI agents in enterprise SaaS engineering. Spanning 30 complex tasks across 6 SaaS domains with 5,370 validation nodes, it incorporates 8 programming languages, 6 databases, and 13 frameworks to meticulously mirror real-world software heterogeneity. Furthermore, we design a dependency-aware hybrid evaluation paradigm tailored for complex systems with long horizons and multi-component coupling, enabling fine-grained, reproducible assessment. Crucially, our extensive experiments reveal a striking insight: the primary bottleneck for state-of-the-art agents is not generating isolated code logic, but successfully configuring and integrating a multi-component system. Over 95% of task failures occur before agents even reach deep business logic, with models often falling victim to overconfidence and prematurely halting during foundational system setup, or getting trapped in ineffective debugging loops. We hope SaaSBench serves as a practical and challenging testbed to drive the evolution of reliable, system-level coding agents. The code is available at https://github.com/ShadeCloak/SaaSbench.
May 15, 2026

RoadmapBench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Agentic Software Development Across Version Upgrades

Coding agents are increasingly deployed in real software development, where a single version iteration requires months of coordinated work across many files. However, most existing benchmarks focus predominantly on single-issue bug fixes from Python repositories, with coarse pass/fail evaluation outcomes, and thus fail to capture long-horizon, multi-target development at real engineering scale. To address this gap, we present RoadmapBench, a benchmark of 115 long-horizon coding tasks grounded in real open-source version upgrades across 17 repositories and 5 programming languages. Each task places the agent on a source-version code snapshot and provides a multi-target roadmap instruction requiring it to implement the functionality introduced in the target version, with a median modification of 3,700 lines across 51 files. We conduct a systematic evaluation on thirteen frontier models and find that even the strongest, Claude-Opus-4.7, resolves only 39.1% of tasks, while the weakest achieves merely 5.2%, in stark contrast to existing bug-fix benchmarks, suggesting that long-horizon software development remains a largely unsolved problem.
May 14, 2026

SWE-Chain: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Chained Release-Level Package Upgrades

Coding agents powered by large language models are increasingly expected to perform realistic software maintenance tasks beyond isolated issue resolution. Existing benchmarks have shifted toward realistic software evolution, but they rarely capture continuous maintenance at the granularity of package releases, where changes are bundled, shipped, and inherited by subsequent versions. We present SWE-Chain, a benchmark for evaluating agents on chained release-level package upgrades, where each transition builds on the agent's prior codebase. To produce upgrade specifications, we design a divide-and-conquer synthesis pipeline that aligns release notes with code diffs for each version transition, ensuring the requirements are grounded in actual code changes, informative to agents, and feasible to implement. SWE-Chain contains 12 upgrade chains across 9 real Python packages, with 155 version transitions and 1,660 grounded upgrade requirements. Across nine frontier agent-model configurations, agents achieve an average of 44.8% resolving, 65.4% precision, and 50.2% F1 under the Build+Fix regime, with Claude-Opus-4.7 (Claude Code) leading at 60.8% resolving, 80.6% precision, and 68.5% F1. These results show that SWE-Chain is both feasible and discriminative, and reveal that current agents still struggle to make correct upgrades across chained package releases without breaking existing functionality.
May 13, 2026

Code-Centric Detection of Vulnerability-Fixing Commits: A Unified Benchmark and Empirical Study

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.
May 13, 2026

AgentLens: Revealing The Lucky Pass Problem in SWE-Agent Evaluation

Evaluation of software engineering (SWE) agents is dominated by a binary signal: whether the final patch passes the tests. This outcome-only view treats a principled solution and a chaotic trial-and-error process as equivalent. We show that this equivalence is empirically false. We evaluate 2,614 OpenHands trajectories from eight model backends on 60 SWE-bench Verified tasks. Of these, 47 have enough passing trajectories to construct task-level process references, yielding a 1,815-trajectory evaluation subset. Among passing trajectories in this subset, 10.7% exhibit behavior we call a Lucky Pass: regression cycles, blind retries, missing verification, or temporally disordered exploration, implementation, and verification. We introduce AgentLens, a framework for process-level assessment of SWE-agent trajectories, and define AgentLens-Bench, a dataset of 1,815 trajectories annotated with quality scores, waste signals, divergence points, and 47 task-level Prefix Tree Acceptor (PTA) references. AgentLens builds PTA references by merging multiple passing solutions for the same task, and uses a context-sensitive intent labeler to assign actions to Exploration, Implementation, Verification, or Orchestration based on trajectory history rather than tool identity alone. On AgentLens-Bench, the quality score separates passing trajectories into Lucky, Solid, and Ideal tiers and further decomposes Lucky Passes into five recurring mechanisms. Across the eight model backends, Lucky rates range from 0.5% to 23.2%, and some models move by as many as five rank positions when ranked by quality score instead of pass rate. We plan to release the project repository soon, including AgentLens-Bench artifacts, the AgentLens SDK, and the analysis tooling.
May 12, 2026

Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills

Large Language Model agents are increasingly augmented with agent skills. Current evaluation methods for skills remain limited. Most deployed benchmarks report only pass rate before and after a skill is attached, treating the skill as a black box change to agent behavior. We introduce Counterfactual Trace Auditing (CTA), a framework for measuring how a skill changes agent behavior. CTA pairs each with skill agent trace with a without skill counterpart on the same task, segments both traces into goal directed phases, aligns the phases, and emits structured Skill Influence Pattern (SIP) annotations. These annotations describe the behavioral effect of a skill rather than only its task outcome. We instantiate CTA on SWE-Skills-Bench with Claude across 49 software engineering tasks. The resulting audit reveals a clear evaluation gap. Pass rate changes by only +0.3 percentage points on average, suggesting little aggregate effect. Yet CTA identifies 522 SIP instances across the same paired traces, showing that the skills substantially reshape agent behavior even when pass rate is nearly unchanged. The audit also separates several recurring effects that pass rate cannot detect, including literal template copying, off task artifact creation, excess planning, and task recovery. Three findings emerge. First, high baseline tasks contain most of the observed skill effects, although their pass rate is already saturated and therefore cannot reflect those effects. Second, tasks with moderate baseline performance show the most recoverable gain, but often at substantially higher token cost. Third, the dominant SIP type can be identified by baseline bucket: surface anchoring is most common on ceiling tasks and edge-case prompting is most common on mid-range and floor tasks. These regularities turn informal failure mode observations into reproducible behavioral measurements.
May 10, 2026

An Executable Benchmarking Suite for Tool-Using Agents

Closed-loop tool-using agents are increasingly evaluated in executable web, code, and micro-task environments, but benchmark reports often conflate workloads, action-generating drivers, and the evidence admitted for systems-facing claims. We present an executable benchmarking suite that makes these objects explicit under a shared evidence-admission contract. The suite connects WebArena Verified, a SWE-Gym slice with SWE-bench-compatible verification, and MiniWoB++ through common workload adapters, task manifests, event schemas, replay/freeze policy, declared drivers, and reporting pipelines. In the canonical release, the gate separates paper-facing evidence from preflight, fixture, smoke, and diagnostic rows while preserving non-admitted artifacts for audit and onboarding. The admitted evidence records latency, invalid-action behavior, patch-generation cost, verifier metadata, replay bindings, and provenance under one auditable contract. The gate is decision-relevant rather than merely clerical: in a separate WebArena Verified controller study, clean-baseline and medium live-stressed evaluation select different fixed controller variants under the same workload and admission contract. The release is scoped as a benchmarking suite and admitted evidence, not a new agent policy, model leaderboard, backend comparison, or autonomous SWE-bench solver.
May 8, 2026

SWE Atlas: Benchmarking Coding Agents Beyond Issue Resolution

We introduce SWE Atlas, a benchmark suite for coding agents spanning three professional software engineering workflows: Codebase Q&A (124 tasks), Test Writing (90 tasks), and Refactoring (70 tasks). SWE Atlas differs from prior SWE benchmarks in three key ways: it targets underrepresented but practically important task categories, uses comprehensive category-specific evaluation protocols, and adopts under-specified, agentic task formulations that better reflect real-world usage. Its evaluation framework combines programmatic checks with rubric-based assessment. This goes beyond functional correctness, evaluating software engineering quality, including test and refactor completeness, maintainability, reusable abstractions, and codebase hygiene. We evaluate a range of frontier and open-weight models on SWE Atlas and find that GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.7 achieve the strongest overall performance, while even the best open-weight models score poorly. Our analysis suggests that top models rely on extensive codebase exploration and runtime-driven reasoning. However, even top models consistently struggle with subtle edge cases, complex runtime analysis, and adherence to software engineering best practices. Overall, SWE Atlas provides a complementary evaluation suite for measuring both correctness and engineering quality in coding agents.
May 6, 2026

SWE-WebDevBench: Evaluating Coding Agent Application Platforms as Virtual Software Agencies

The emergence of "vibe coding" platforms, where users describe applications in natural language and AI agents autonomously generate full-stack software, has created a need for rigorous evaluation beyond code-level benchmarks. In order to assess them as virtual software development agencies on understanding business requirements, making architectural decisions, writing production code, handling iterative modifications, and maintaining business readiness, we introduce SWE-WebDev Bench, a 68-metric evaluation framework spanning 25 primary and 43 diagnostic metrics across seven groups, organized along three dimensions: Interaction Mode (App Creation Request (ACR) vs. App Modification Request (AMR)), Agency Angle (Product Manager (PM), Engineering, Ops), and Complexity Tier (T4 multi-role SaaS, T5 AI-native). Our evaluation (six platforms, three domains, 18 evaluation cells) reveals four recurring shortcomings in the current generation of AI app builders: (1) A specification bottleneck, where platforms compress rich business requirements into oversimplified technical plans, (2) A pervasive frontend-backend decoupling, where visually polished UIs mask absent or broken backend infrastructure, (3) A steep production-readiness cliff, where no platform scores above 60% on engineering quality and post-generation human effort varies substantially across platforms and (4) Widespread security and infrastructure failures, with no platform exceeding 65% Security Score against a 90% target and concurrency handling as low as 6%. These observations are descriptive of our sample and require larger-scale replication to establish generality. We release SWE-WebDev Bench as a community benchmark to enable such replication and help platform builders identify and address these gaps. Code and benchmark resources are available at: https://github.com/snowmountainAi/webdevbench and https://webdevbench.com/.
May 6, 2026

Beyond Retrieval: A Multitask Benchmark and Model for Code Search

Code search has usually been evaluated as first-stage retrieval, even though production systems rely on broader pipelines with reranking and developer-style queries. Existing benchmarks also suffer from data contamination, label noise, and degenerate binary relevance. In this paper, we introduce CoREB, a contamination-limited, multitask code retrieval and reranking benchmark, together with a fine-tuned code reranker, that goes beyond retrieval to cover the full code search pipeline. CoREB is built from counterfactually rewritten LiveCodeBench problems in five programming languages and delivered as timed releases with graded relevance judgments. We benchmark eleven embedding models and five rerankers across three tasks: text-to-code, code-to-text, and code-to-code. Our experiments reveal that: \circone code-specialised embeddings dominate code-to-code retrieval (∼2×{\sim}2{\times} over general encoders), yet no single model wins all three tasks; \circtwo short keyword queries, the format closest to real developer search, collapse every model to near-zero nDCG@10; \circthree off-the-shelf rerankers are task-asymmetric, with a 12-point swing on code-to-code and no baseline net-positive across all tasks; \circfour our fine-tuned CoREB-Reranker is the first to achieve consistent gains across all three tasks. The data and model are released.
May 5, 2026

ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?

Turning ideas into full software projects from scratch has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are being deployed to seed, maintain, and grow codebases over extended periods with minimal human oversight. Such settings require models to make high-level software architecture decisions. However, existing benchmarks measure focused, limited tasks such as fixing a single bug or developing a single, specified feature. We therefore introduce ProgramBench to measure the ability of software engineering agents to develop software holisitically. In ProgramBench, given only a program and its documentation, agents must architect and implement a codebase that matches the reference executable's behavior. End-to-end behavioral tests are generated via agent-driven fuzzing, enabling evaluation without prescribing implementation structure. Our 200 tasks range from compact CLI tools to widely used software such as FFmpeg, SQLite, and the PHP interpreter. We evaluate 9 LMs and find that none fully resolve any task, with the best model passing 95% of tests on only 3% of tasks. Models favor monolithic, single-file implementations that diverge sharply from human-written code.
Apr 27, 2026

SWE-QA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Complex Code Understanding

In this paper, we introduce SWE-QA, a text and code corpus aimed at benchmarking multi-hop code comprehension, addressing the gap between simplified evaluation tasks and the complex reasoning required in real-world software development. While existing code understanding benchmarks focus on isolated snippets, developers must routinely connect information across multiple dispersed code segments. The dataset comprises 9,072 multiple-choice questions systematically generated from 12 Python repositories of SWE-bench, evaluating several recurrent reasoning patterns like Declaration-and-Call questions that link entity definitions to their usage, and Interacting-Entity questions that examine the dynamic relationships among multiple collaborating components. Generated through parsing-based entity extraction and Large Language Model assisted question construction with carefully validated distractors, the benchmark distinguishes genuine comprehension from superficial pattern matching. Evaluation of 15 language models (360M to 671B parameters) reveals significant challenges in multi-hop reasoning, with best performance reaching 74.41% accuracy. Dense architectures consistently outperform mixture-of-experts models by 10-14 percentage points, while reasoning-enhanced variants show inconsistent benefits.
Apr 22, 2026

Deja Vu at Scale: Paraphrase-Robust Detection of Duplicate Gherkin Steps in Behaviour-Driven Software Testing with Sentence-Transformer Embeddings and a 1.1M-Step Open Benchmark

Context. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites in Gherkin accumulate step-text duplication with documented maintenance cost. Prior detectors either require runnable tests or are single-organisation, leaving a gap: a static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector and a public benchmark to calibrate it. Objective. We release (i) the largest cross-organisational BDD step corpus to date, (ii) a labelled pair-level calibration benchmark, and (iii) a four-strategy detector with a consolidation-savings model linking clusters to ISO/IEC 25010 maintainability sub-characteristics. Method. The corpus contains 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps, SPDX-tagged. The detector layers exact hashing, normalised Levenshtein, sentence-transformer cosine, and a Levenshtein-banded hybrid. Calibration uses 1,020 manually labelled step pairs under a released rubric (60-pair overlap, Fleiss kappa = 0.84). We report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs under the primary rubric and a score-free relabelling, and benchmark against SourcererCC-style and NiCad-style lexical baselines. Results. Step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2%; median-repository rate is 58.6% (Spearman rho = 0.51). The top hybrid cluster has 20,737 occurrences across 2,245 files. Near-exact reaches F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; semantic F1 = 0.906 under the primary rubric reflects a disclosed stratification artefact. Lexical baselines reach F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The savings model estimates 893,357 corpus-wide eliminable step occurrences; on the median repository 62.5% of step lines are eliminable.