new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jul 27

Benchmarking AI Models in Software Engineering: A Review, Search Tool, and Enhancement Protocol

Benchmarks are essential for consistent evaluation and reproducibility. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Software Engineering (AI4SE) has given rise to numerous benchmarks for tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, this surge presents challenges: (1) scattered benchmark knowledge across tasks, (2) difficulty in selecting relevant benchmarks, (3) the absence of a uniform standard for benchmark development, and (4) limitations of existing benchmarks. In this paper, we review 173 studies and identify 204 AI4SE benchmarks. We classify these benchmarks, analyze their limitations, and expose gaps in practices. Based on our review, we created BenchScout, a semantic search tool to find relevant benchmarks, using automated clustering of the contexts from associated studies. We conducted a user study with 22 participants to evaluate BenchScout's usability, effectiveness, and intuitiveness which resulted in average scores of 4.5, 4.0, and 4.1 out of 5. To advance benchmarking standards, we propose BenchFrame, a unified method to enhance benchmark quality. As a case study, we applied BenchFrame to the HumanEval benchmark and addressed its main limitations. This led to HumanEvalNext, featuring (1) corrected errors, (2) improved language conversion, (3) expanded test coverage, and (4) increased difficulty. We then evaluated ten state-of-the-art code language models on HumanEval, HumanEvalPlus, and HumanEvalNext. On HumanEvalNext, models showed a pass@1 score reduction of 31.22% and 19.94% compared to HumanEval and HumanEvalPlus, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025 2

How to Build AI Agents by Augmenting LLMs with Codified Human Expert Domain Knowledge? A Software Engineering Framework

Critical domain knowledge typically resides with few experts, creating organizational bottlenecks in scalability and decision-making. Non-experts struggle to create effective visualizations, leading to suboptimal insights and diverting expert time. This paper investigates how to capture and embed human domain knowledge into AI agent systems through an industrial case study. We propose a software engineering framework to capture human domain knowledge for engineering AI agents in simulation data visualization by augmenting a Large Language Model (LLM) with a request classifier, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for code generation, codified expert rules, and visualization design principles unified in an agent demonstrating autonomous, reactive, proactive, and social behavior. Evaluation across five scenarios spanning multiple engineering domains with 12 evaluators demonstrates 206% improvement in output quality, with our agent achieving expert-level ratings in all cases versus baseline's poor performance, while maintaining superior code quality with lower variance. Our contributions are: an automated agent-based system for visualization generation and a validated framework for systematically capturing human domain knowledge and codifying tacit expert knowledge into AI agents, demonstrating that non-experts can achieve expert-level outcomes in specialized domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 21

KISS Sorcar: A Stupidly-Simple General-Purpose and Software Engineering AI Assistant

Large language models can generate code and call tools with remarkable fluency, yet deploying them as practical software engineering assistants still expose stubborn gaps: finite context windows, single mistakes that derail entire sessions, agents that get stuck in dead ends, AI slop, and generated changes that are difficult to review or revert. We present KISS Sorcar, a general-purpose assistant and integrated development environment (IDE) built on top of the KISS Agent Framework, a stupidly-simple AI agent framework of roughly 1,850 lines of code. The framework addresses these gaps using a robust system prompt and through a five-layer agent hierarchy in which each layer adds exactly one concern: budget-tracked ReAct execution, automatic continuation across sub-sessions via summarization, coding, and browser tools with parallel sub-agents, persistent multi-turn chat with history recall, and git worktree isolation so every task runs on its own branch. To assess the power of the KISS agent framework, we implemented KISS Sorcar as a free, open-source Visual Studio Code extension that runs locally and effectively for long-horizon tasks, and supports browser automation, multimodal input, and Docker containers. In this research, we deliberately prioritize output quality over latency: giving a frontier model adequate time to validate its own output -- running linters, type checkers, and tests -- dramatically reduces the low-quality code that plagues faster but less thorough agents. The entire system was built using itself in 4.5 months, providing a continuous stress test in which any agent-introduced bug immediately impairs its own ability to work. On Terminal Bench 2.0, KISS Sorcar achieves a 62.2% overall pass rate with Claude Opus 4.6, comparing favorably to Claude Code (58%) and Cursor Composer 2 (61.7).

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 25

EXPEREPAIR: Dual-Memory Enhanced LLM-based Repository-Level Program Repair

Automatically repairing software issues remains a fundamental challenge at the intersection of software engineering and AI. Although recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for repository-level repair tasks, current methodologies exhibit two notable limitations: (1) they often address issues in isolation, neglecting to incorporate insights from previously resolved issues, and (2) they rely on static and rigid prompting strategies, which constrain their ability to generalize across diverse and evolving issue scenarios. Inspired by the dual memory systems of human cognition, where episodic and semantic memories work synergistically to support human reasoning and decision-making, we propose ExpeRepair, a novel LLM-based approach that continuously learns from historical repair experiences through dual-channel knowledge accumulation. ExpeRepair organizes historical repair experiences into two complementary memories: an episodic memory that stores concrete repair demonstrations, and a semantic memory that encodes abstract reflective insights. At inference time, ExpeRepair activates both memory systems by retrieving relevant demonstrations from episodic memory and recalling high-level repair insights from semantic memory. It further enhances adaptability through dynamic prompt composition, synergistically integrating both memory types to replace static prompts with context-aware, experience-driven prompts. Experiments on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark demonstrate that ExpeRepair achieves a pass@1 score of 49.3% with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, outperforming all state-of-the-art open-source methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

AI Harness Engineering: A Runtime Substrate for Foundation-Model Software Agents

Foundation models have transformed automated code generation, yet autonomous software-engineering agents remain unreliable in realistic development settings. The dominant explanation locates this gap in model capability. We propose a different locus: software-engineering capability emerges from a model-harness-environment system, in which a runtime substrate -- the harness -- mediates how a foundation-model agent observes a project, acts on it, receives feedback, and establishes that a change is complete. We formalize this substrate as an AI Harness Engineering and identify eleven component responsibilities: task specification, context selection, tool access, project memory, task state, observability, failure attribution, verification, permissions, entropy auditing, and intervention recording. We operationalize the harness through a four-level ladder (H0-H3) that progressively exposes runtime support to the agent, and we propose a trace-based evaluation protocol that converts each agent run into an auditable episode package. Applied to a controlled validation task, the framework yields episode packages whose evidence structure varies systematically with harness level: lower levels produce only a final patch, higher levels produce reproduction logs, failure attributions, deterministic requirement checks, and structured verification reports. The framework reframes the central question of autonomous software engineering from whether a foundation model can produce a patch to whether the model-harness-environment system can produce a verifiably correct, attributed, and maintainable change. We outline a research program for the runtime systems that foundation-model software agents will require.

  • 2 authors
·
May 12

Unified Software Engineering agent as AI Software Engineer

The growth of Large Language Model (LLM) technology has raised expectations for automated coding. However, software engineering is more than coding and is concerned with activities including maintenance and evolution of a project. In this context, the concept of LLM agents has gained traction, which utilize LLMs as reasoning engines to invoke external tools autonomously. But is an LLM agent the same as an AI software engineer? In this paper, we seek to understand this question by developing a Unified Software Engineering agent or USEagent. Unlike existing work which builds specialized agents for specific software tasks such as testing, debugging, and repair, our goal is to build a unified agent which can orchestrate and handle multiple capabilities. This gives the agent the promise of handling complex scenarios in software development such as fixing an incomplete patch, adding new features, or taking over code written by others. We envision USEagent as the first draft of a future AI Software Engineer which can be a team member in future software development teams involving both AI and humans. To evaluate the efficacy of USEagent, we build a Unified Software Engineering bench (USEbench) comprising of myriad tasks such as coding, testing, and patching. USEbench is a judicious mixture of tasks from existing benchmarks such as SWE-bench, SWT-bench, and REPOCOD. In an evaluation on USEbench consisting of 1,271 repository-level software engineering tasks, USEagent shows improved efficacy compared to existing general agents such as OpenHands CodeActAgent. There exist gaps in the capabilities of USEagent for certain coding tasks, which provides hints on further developing the AI Software Engineer of the future.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

Confucius Code Agent: An Open-sourced AI Software Engineer at Industrial Scale

Real-world AI software engineering demands coding agents that can reason over massive repositories, maintain durable memory across and within long sessions, and robustly coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing open-source coding agents provide transparency but frequently fall short when pushed to these industrial-scale workloads, while proprietary coding agents offer strong practical performance but limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We present the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), an open-sourced AI software engineer that can operate at an industrial scale. CCA is built atop the Confucius SDK, an open-sourced agent development platform designed around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK introduces a unified orchestrator with hierarchical working memory for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension module for robust tool use. Moreover, a meta-agent automates the synthesis, evaluation, and refinement of agent configurations through a build-test-improve loop, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks, environments, and tool stacks. Instantiated on Confucius SDK with these mechanisms, CCA delivers strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a state-of-the-art Resolve@1 performance of 54.3%, substantially improving over prior coding agents. Together, the Confucius SDK and CCA provide a transparent, extensible, and reproducible foundation for AI agents, bridge gaps between research prototypes and production-grade systems, and support agent development and deployment at industrial scale.

metaresearch Meta Research
·
Dec 11, 2025 6

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI

This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.

  • 3 authors
·
May 25, 2025 2

Experimenting with Multi-Agent Software Development: Towards a Unified Platform

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8, 2024

The Rise of AI Teammates in Software Engineering (SE) 3.0: How Autonomous Coding Agents Are Reshaping Software Engineering

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

Reproducible, Explainable, and Effective Evaluations of Agentic AI for Software Engineering

With the advancement of Agentic AI, researchers are increasingly leveraging autonomous agents to address challenges in software engineering (SE). However, the large language models (LLMs) that underpin these agents often function as black boxes, making it difficult to justify the superiority of Agentic AI approaches over baselines. Furthermore, missing information in the evaluation design description frequently renders the reproduction of results infeasible. To synthesize current evaluation practices for Agentic AI in SE, this study analyzes 18 papers on the topic, published or accepted by ICSE 2026, ICSE 2025, FSE 2025, ASE 2025, and ISSTA 2025. The analysis identifies prevailing approaches and their limitations in evaluating Agentic AI for SE, both in current research and potential future studies. To address these shortcomings, this position paper proposes a set of guidelines and recommendations designed to empower reproducible, explainable, and effective evaluations of Agentic AI in software engineering. In particular, we recommend that Agentic AI researchers make their Thought-Action-Result (TAR) trajectories and LLM interaction data, or summarized versions of these artifacts, publicly accessible. Doing so will enable subsequent studies to more effectively analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different Agentic AI approaches. To demonstrate the feasibility of such comparisons, we present a proof-of-concept case study that illustrates how TAR trajectories can support systematic analysis across approaches.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 31

Rethinking Autonomy: Preventing Failures in AI-Driven Software Engineering

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?

We introduce SWE-Bench Pro, a substantially more challenging benchmark that builds upon the best practices of SWE-BENCH [25], but is explicitly designed to capture realistic, complex, enterprise-level problems beyond the scope of SWE-BENCH. SWE-BENCH PRO contains 1,865 problems sourced from a diverse set of 41 actively maintained repositories spanning business applications, B2B services, and developer tools. The benchmark is partitioned into a public set with open access to problems sourced from 11 repositories, a held-out set of 12 repositories and a commercial set of 18 proprietary repositories where we have formal partnership agreements with early-stage startups. Problems in the held-out and the commercial set are not publicly accessible, but we release results on the commercial set. Our benchmark features long-horizon tasks that may require hours to days for a professional software engineer to complete, often involving patches across multiple files and substantial code modifications. All tasks are human-verified and augmented with sufficient context to ensure resolvability. In our evaluation of widely used coding models, under a unified scaffold, we observe that their performance on SWE-Bench PRO remains below 25% (Pass@1), with GPT-5 achieving the highest score to date at 23.3%. To better understand these limitations, we cluster the failure modes observed in the collected agent trajectories for a clearer characterization of the error patterns exhibited by current models. Overall, SWE-BENCH PRO provides a contamination-resistant testbed that more faithfully captures the complexity and diversity of real-world software development, advancing the pursuit of truly autonomous software engineering agents at a professional level.

  • 19 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025 3

TENET: Leveraging Tests Beyond Validation for Code Generation

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted software engineering practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside code implementation, ensuring that software behavior is continuously validated and refined. In the era of vibe coding, where developers increasingly delegate code writing to large language models (LLMs) by specifying high-level intentions, TDD becomes even more crucial, as test cases serve as executable specifications that explicitly define and verify intended functionality beyond what natural-language descriptions and code context can convey. While vibe coding under TDD is promising, there are three main challenges: (1) selecting a small yet effective test suite to improve the generation accuracy and control the execution workload, (2) retrieving context such as relevant code effectively, and (3) systematically using test feedback for effective code refinement. To address these challenges, we introduce TENET, an LLM agent for generating functions in complex real-world repositories under the TDD setting. TENET features three components: (1) a novel test harness mechanism that selects a concise test suite to maximize diversity of target usage scenarios; (2) a tailored agent toolset that performs efficient retrieval of relevant code with interactive debugging; and (3) a reflection-based refinement workflow that iteratively analyzes failures, replenishes context, and applies code refinement. TENET achieves 69.08% and 81.77% Pass@1 on RepoCod and RepoEval benchmarks, outperforming the best agentic baselines by 9.49 and 2.17 percentage points, respectively. In addition, this is the first study of test-driven code generation with repository-level context, examining how different aspects of test suites affect the performance of LLM agents under the TDD setting.

Triage in Software Engineering: A Systematic Review of Research and Practice

As modern software systems continue to grow in complexity, triage has become a fundamental process in system operations and maintenance. Triage aims to efficiently prioritize, assign, and assess issues to ensure the reliability of complex environments. The vast amount of heterogeneous data generated by software systems has made effective triage indispensable for maintaining reliability, facilitating maintainability, and enabling rapid issue response. Motivated by these challenges, researchers have devoted extensive effort to advancing triage automation and have achieved significant progress over the past two decades. This survey provides a comprehensive review of 234 papers from 2004 to the present, offering an in-depth examination of the fundamental concepts, system architecture, and problem statement. By comparing the distinct goals of academic and industrial research and by analyzing empirical studies of industrial practices, we identify the major obstacles that limit the practical deployment of triage systems. To assist practitioners in method selection and performance evaluation, we summarize widely adopted open-source datasets and evaluation metrics, providing a unified perspective on the measurement of triage effectiveness. Finally, we outline potential future directions and emerging opportunities to foster a closer integration between academic innovation and industrial application. All reviewed papers and projects are available at https://github.com/AIOps-Lab-NKU/TriageSurvey.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents

AI agents have become increasingly capable at isolated software engineering (SWE) tasks such as resolving issues on Github. Yet long-horizon tasks involving multiple interdependent subtasks still pose challenges both with respect to accuracy, and with respect to timely completion. A natural approach to solving these long-horizon tasks in a timely manner is asynchronous multi-agent collaboration, where multiple agents work on different parts of the task at the same time. But effective application of multi-agent systems has proven surprisingly difficult: concurrent edits by multiple agents interfere with each other, dependencies are difficult to synchronize, and combining partial progress into a coherent whole is challenging. On the other hand, human developers have long relied on mature collaboration infrastructure to manage these challenges in large software projects. Inspired by these collaboration primitives, we introduce Centralized Asynchronous Isolated Delegation (CAID), a structured multi-agent coordination paradigm grounded in three core SWE primitives: centralized task delegation, asynchronous execution, and isolated workspaces. CAID constructs dependency-aware task plans through a central manager, executes subtasks concurrently in isolated workspaces, and consolidates progress via structured integration with executable test-based verification. In empirical evaluation, we find that CAID improves accuracy over single-agent baselines by 26.7% absolute on paper reproduction tasks (PaperBench) and 14.3% on Python library development tasks (Commit0). Through systematic analysis, we find that branch-and-merge is a central coordination mechanism for multi-agent collaboration, and that SWE primitives such as git worktree, git commit, and git merge enable it to be realized in a reliable and executable manner.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22 1

SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?

Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent's flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

SWE-bench SWE-bench
·
Oct 4, 2024

Efficient and Green Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Vision and the Road Ahead

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable capabilities in various software engineering tasks, spurring the rapid growth of the Large Language Models for Software Engineering (LLM4SE) area. However, limited attention has been paid to developing efficient LLM4SE techniques that demand minimal computational cost, time, and memory resources, as well as green LLM4SE solutions that reduce energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. This paper aims to redirect the focus of the research community towards the efficiency and greenness of LLM4SE, while also sharing potential research directions to achieve this goal. It commences with a brief overview of the significance of LLM4SE and highlights the need for efficient and green LLM4SE solutions. Subsequently, the paper presents a vision for a future where efficient and green LLM4SE revolutionizes the LLM-based software engineering tool landscape, benefiting various stakeholders, including industry, individual practitioners, and society. The paper then delineates a roadmap for future research, outlining specific research paths and potential solutions for the research community to pursue. While not intended to be a definitive guide, the paper aims to inspire further progress, with the ultimate goal of establishing efficient and green LLM4SE as a central element in the future of software engineering.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 6, 2024

Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skills

Software engineering (abbrev. SE) has continuously evolved through increasingly powerful forms of reuse, from source code and libraries to components and services. Recent advances in AI agents have introduced a potentially new reusable artifact: skills. Emerging agent skill repositories and marketplaces enable developers to package, share, and reuse SE expertise as reusable skills. This trend raises a fundamental question: what SE activities are being encapsulated into reusable skills? Existing studies primarily focus on a broad range of skills acquisition, safety, or benchmarking, while lacking a systematic understanding of SE-specific skills and their coverage across the software development lifecycle. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of SE skills in public repositories and marketplaces. We collect and analyze a large corpus of SE skills, examining the activities they encapsulate, lifecycle coverage, evolution characteristics, and evaluation mechanisms. Our findings reveal that SE activities are increasingly becoming reusable artifacts via skills and suggest promising research opportunities for skill recommendation and engineering-oriented structuring, as well as the need for mechanisms to encapsulate high-context SE activities into reusable skills. Overall, our study provides the first activity-centric characterization of SE skills and reveals how SE activities are increasingly being transformed into reusable skills. These findings offer new insights into skill reuse, ecosystem development, and the future of agent-centric SE.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 9

OmniCode: A Benchmark for Evaluating Software Engineering Agents

LLM-powered coding agents are redefining how real-world software is developed. To drive the research towards better coding agents, we require challenging benchmarks that can rigorously evaluate the ability of such agents to perform various software engineering tasks. However, popular coding benchmarks such as HumanEval and SWE-Bench focus on narrowly scoped tasks such as competition programming and patch generation. In reality, software engineers have to handle a broader set of tasks for real-world software development. To address this gap, we propose OmniCode, a novel software engineering benchmark that contains a broader and more diverse set of task categories beyond code or patch generation. Overall, OmniCode contains 1794 tasks spanning three programming languages (Python, Java, and C++) and four key categories: bug fixing, test generation, code review fixing, and style fixing. In contrast to prior software engineering benchmarks, the tasks in OmniCode are (1) manually validated to eliminate ill-defined problems, and (2) synthetically crafted or recently curated to avoid data leakage issues, presenting a new framework for synthetically generating diverse software tasks from limited real-world data. We evaluate OmniCode with popular agent frameworks such as SWE-Agent and show that while they may perform well on bug fixing for Python, they fall short on tasks such as Test Generation and in languages such as C++ and Java. For instance, SWE-Agent achieves a maximum of 20.9% with DeepSeek-V3.1 on Java Test Generation tasks. OmniCode aims to serve as a robust benchmark and spur the development of agents that can perform well across different aspects of software development. Code and data are available at https://github.com/seal-research/OmniCode.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 2

From Copilot to Pilot: Towards AI Supported Software Development

AI-supported programming has arrived, as shown by the introduction and successes of large language models for code, such as Copilot/Codex (Github/OpenAI) and AlphaCode (DeepMind). Above human average performance on programming challenges is now possible. However, software engineering is much more than solving programming contests. Moving beyond code completion to AI-supported software engineering will require an AI system that can, among other things, understand how to avoid code smells, to follow language idioms, and eventually (maybe!) propose rational software designs. In this study, we explore the current limitations of AI-supported code completion tools like Copilot and offer a simple taxonomy for understanding the classification of AI-supported code completion tools in this space. We first perform an exploratory study on Copilot's code suggestions for language idioms and code smells. Copilot does not follow language idioms and avoid code smells in most of our test scenarios. We then conduct additional investigation to determine the current boundaries of AI-supported code completion tools like Copilot by introducing a taxonomy of software abstraction hierarchies where 'basic programming functionality' such as code compilation and syntax checking is at the least abstract level, software architecture analysis and design are at the most abstract level. We conclude by providing a discussion on challenges for future development of AI-supported code completion tools to reach the design level of abstraction in our taxonomy.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 7, 2023

SWE-RM: Execution-free Feedback For Software Engineering Agents

Execution-based feedback like unit testing is widely used in the development of coding agents through test-time scaling (TTS) and reinforcement learning (RL). This paradigm requires scalable and reliable collection of unit test cases to provide accurate feedback, and the resulting feedback is often sparse and cannot effectively distinguish between trajectories that are both successful or both unsuccessful. In contrast, execution-free feedback from reward models can provide more fine-grained signals without depending on unit test cases. Despite this potential, execution-free feedback for realistic software engineering (SWE) agents remains underexplored. Aiming to develop versatile reward models that are effective across TTS and RL, however, we observe that two verifiers with nearly identical TTS performance can nevertheless yield very different results in RL. Intuitively, TTS primarily reflects the model's ability to select the best trajectory, but this ability does not necessarily generalize to RL. To address this limitation, we identify two additional aspects that are crucial for RL training: classification accuracy and calibration. We then conduct comprehensive controlled experiments to investigate how to train a robust reward model that performs well across these metrics. In particular, we analyze the impact of various factors such as training data scale, policy mixtures, and data source composition. Guided by these investigations, we introduce SWE-RM, an accurate and robust reward model adopting a mixture-of-experts architecture with 30B total parameters and 3B activated during inference. SWE-RM substantially improves SWE agents on both TTS and RL performance. For example, it increases the accuracy of Qwen3-Coder-Flash from 51.6% to 62.0%, and Qwen3-Coder-Max from 67.0% to 74.6% on SWE-Bench Verified using TTS, achieving new state-of-the-art performance among open-source models.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 26, 2025 2

Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap

Agentic Software Engineering (SE 3.0) represents a new era where intelligent agents are tasked not with simple code generation, but with achieving complex, goal-oriented SE objectives. To harness these new capabilities while ensuring trustworthiness, we must recognize a fundamental duality within the SE field in the Agentic SE era, comprising two symbiotic modalities: SE for Humans and SE for Agents. This duality demands a radical reimagining of the foundational pillars of SE (actors, processes, tools, and artifacts) which manifest differently across each modality. We propose two purpose-built workbenches to support this vision. The Agent Command Environment (ACE) serves as a command center where humans orchestrate and mentor agent teams, handling outputs such as Merge-Readiness Packs (MRPs) and Consultation Request Packs (CRPs). The Agent Execution Environment (AEE) is a digital workspace where agents perform tasks while invoking human expertise when facing ambiguity or complex trade-offs. This bi-directional partnership, which supports agent-initiated human callbacks and handovers, gives rise to new, structured engineering activities (i.e., processes) that redefine human-AI collaboration, elevating the practice from agentic coding to true agentic software engineering. This paper presents the Structured Agentic Software Engineering (SASE) vision, outlining several of the foundational pillars for the future of SE. The paper culminates in a research roadmap that identifies a few key challenges and opportunities while briefly discussing the resulting impact of this future on SE education. Our goal is not to offer a definitive solution, but to provide a conceptual scaffold with structured vocabulary to catalyze a community-wide dialogue, pushing the SE community to think beyond its classic, human-centric tenets toward a disciplined, scalable, and trustworthy agentic future.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 7, 2025 2

VibeTensor: System Software for Deep Learning, Fully Generated by AI Agents

VIBETENSOR is an open-source research system software stack for deep learning, generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance. In this paper, "fully generated" refers to code provenance: implementation changes were produced and applied as agent-proposed diffs; validation relied on agent-run builds, tests, and differential checks, without per-change manual diff review. It implements a PyTorch-style eager tensor library with a C++20 core (CPU+CUDA), a torch-like Python overlay via nanobind, and an experimental Node.js/TypeScript interface. Unlike thin bindings, VIBETENSOR includes its own tensor/storage system, schema-lite dispatcher, reverse-mode autograd, CUDA runtime (streams/events/graphs), a stream-ordered caching allocator with diagnostics, and a stable C ABI for dynamically loaded operator plugins. We view this release as a milestone for AI-assisted software engineering: it shows coding agents can generate a coherent deep learning runtime spanning language bindings down to CUDA memory management, validated primarily by builds and tests. We describe the architecture, summarize the workflow used to produce and validate the system, and evaluate the artifact. We report repository scale and test-suite composition, and summarize reproducible microbenchmarks from an accompanying AI-generated kernel suite, including fused attention versus PyTorch SDPA/FlashAttention. We also report end-to-end training sanity checks on 3 small workloads (sequence reversal, ViT, miniGPT) on NVIDIA H100 (Hopper, SM90) and Blackwell-class GPUs; multi-GPU results are Blackwell-only and use an optional CUTLASS-based ring-allreduce plugin gated on CUDA 13+ and sm103a toolchain support. Finally, we discuss failure modes in generated system software, including a "Frankenstein" composition effect where locally correct subsystems interact to yield globally suboptimal performance.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 20

Ambig-SWE: Interactive Agents to Overcome Underspecificity in Software Engineering

AI agents are increasingly being deployed to automate tasks, often based on underspecified user instructions. Making unwarranted assumptions to compensate for the missing information and failing to ask clarifying questions can lead to suboptimal outcomes, safety risks due to tool misuse, and wasted computational resources. In this work, we study the ability of LLM agents to handle underspecified instructions in interactive code generation settings by evaluating proprietary and open-weight models on their performance across three key steps: (a) detecting underspecificity, (b) asking targeted clarification questions, and (c) leveraging the interaction to improve performance in underspecified scenarios. We introduce Ambig-SWE, an underspecified variant of SWE-Bench Verified, specifically designed to evaluate agent behavior under ambiguity and interaction. Our findings reveal that models struggle to distinguish between well-specified and underspecified instructions. However, when models interact for underspecified inputs, they effectively obtain vital information from the user leading to significant improvements in performance, up to 74% over the non-interactive settings, underscoring the value of effective interaction. Our study highlights critical gaps in how current state-of-the-art models handle missing information in complex software engineering tasks and structures the evaluation into distinct steps to enable targeted improvements.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 20

Assessing the Use of AutoML for Data-Driven Software Engineering

Background. Due to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for building software applications, companies are struggling to recruit employees with a deep understanding of such technologies. In this scenario, AutoML is soaring as a promising solution to fill the AI/ML skills gap since it promises to automate the building of end-to-end AI/ML pipelines that would normally be engineered by specialized team members. Aims. Despite the growing interest and high expectations, there is a dearth of information about the extent to which AutoML is currently adopted by teams developing AI/ML-enabled systems and how it is perceived by practitioners and researchers. Method. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we present a mixed-method study comprising a benchmark of 12 end-to-end AutoML tools on two SE datasets and a user survey with follow-up interviews to further our understanding of AutoML adoption and perception. Results. We found that AutoML solutions can generate models that outperform those trained and optimized by researchers to perform classification tasks in the SE domain. Also, our findings show that the currently available AutoML solutions do not live up to their names as they do not equally support automation across the stages of the ML development workflow and for all the team members. Conclusions. We derive insights to inform the SE research community on how AutoML can facilitate their activities and tool builders on how to design the next generation of AutoML technologies.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

RigorBench: Benchmarking Engineering Process Discipline in Autonomous AI Coding Agents

Agentic coding harnesses - such as Agent-Skills, Superpowers, and Agent-Rigor - are increasingly deployed to augment underlying LLMs for real-world software engineering tasks. Existing benchmarks evaluate these agents almost exclusively on outcome correctness: whether generated code passes tests or resolves issues. We argue that this outcome-only lens is insufficient: an agent that arrives at a correct solution through reckless trial-and-error, without planning, verification, or graceful recovery, is fundamentally less reliable than one that follows sound engineering discipline. We introduce RigorBench, the first benchmark designed to measure process discipline in AI coding agents. RigorBench evaluates these harnesses across five pillars: Planning Fidelity, Verification Coverage, Recovery Efficiency, Abstention Quality, and Atomic Transition Integrity. A composite RigorScore aggregates these dimensions into a single metric via a weighted sum. We curate a suite of 30 tasks spanning five categories - Plan-Then-Build, Verify-Or-Die, Doom Loop Gauntlet, Know When to Fold, and Don't Break the Build-and evaluate leading harnesses in a controlled with/without experimental design against baseline coding assistants. Our results show that structured process discipline not only improves process quality scores by an average of 41% but also raises downstream outcome correctness by 17%, providing the first quantitative evidence that how agents code matters as much as what they produce. We release the full benchmark, scoring rubrics, and trajectory analysis tools as open-source artifacts.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 20

Exploring the Reasoning Depth of Small Language Models in Software Architecture: A Multidimensional Evaluation Framework Towards Software Engineering 2.0

In the era of "Software Engineering 2.0" (SE 2.0), where intelligent agents collaborate with human engineers, Generative AI is advancing beyond code generation into Software Architecture (SA). While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate superior capabilities, computational costs and data privacy concerns drive interest in Small Language Models (SLMs) with fewer than 7 billion parameters. However, the reasoning limits of these resource-constrained models remain unexplored. This study benchmarks 10 state-of-the-art SLMs on Architectural Decision Records generation, introducing a multi-dimensional framework evaluating Technical Compliance and Semantic Diversity. Our empirical results reveal a significant reasoning gap: models above the 3B-parameter threshold demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities, while sub-2B models show the strongest BERTScore gains from Fine-Tuning, though compliance improvements are not guaranteed. Contrary to assumptions regarding context saturation, Few-Shot prompting serves as a highly effective calibration mechanism for select mid-sized models with short context windows. Furthermore, high semantic diversity in off-the-shelf small models often correlates with hallucination rather than productive exploration. These findings establish a rigorous baseline for deploying sustainable, locally hosted architectural assistants.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6

An Empirical Study on Usage and Perceptions of LLMs in a Software Engineering Project

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a leap in artificial intelligence, excelling in tasks using human language(s). Although the main focus of general-purpose LLMs is not code generation, they have shown promising results in the domain. However, the usefulness of LLMs in an academic software engineering project has not been fully explored yet. In this study, we explore the usefulness of LLMs for 214 students working in teams consisting of up to six members. Notably, in the academic course through which this study is conducted, students were encouraged to integrate LLMs into their development tool-chain, in contrast to most other academic courses that explicitly prohibit the use of LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the AI-generated code, prompts used for code generation, and the human intervention levels to integrate the code into the code base. We also conduct a perception study to gain insights into the perceived usefulness, influencing factors, and future outlook of LLM from a computer science student's perspective. Our findings suggest that LLMs can play a crucial role in the early stages of software development, especially in generating foundational code structures, and helping with syntax and error debugging. These insights provide us with a framework on how to effectively utilize LLMs as a tool to enhance the productivity of software engineering students, and highlight the necessity of shifting the educational focus toward preparing students for successful human-AI collaboration.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

AgentMesh: A Cooperative Multi-Agent Generative AI Framework for Software Development Automation

Software development is a complex, multi-phase process traditionally requiring collaboration among individuals with diverse expertise. We propose AgentMesh, a Python-based framework that uses multiple cooperating LLM-powered agents to automate software development tasks. In AgentMesh, specialized agents - a Planner, Coder, Debugger, and Reviewer - work in concert to transform a high-level requirement into fully realized code. The Planner agent first decomposes user requests into concrete subtasks; the Coder agent implements each subtask in code; the Debugger agent tests and fixes the code; and the Reviewer agent validates the final output for correctness and quality. We describe the architecture and design of these agents and their communication, and provide implementation details including prompt strategies and workflow orchestration. A case study illustrates AgentMesh handling a non-trivial development request via sequential task planning, code generation, iterative debugging, and final code review. We discuss how dividing responsibilities among cooperative agents leverages the strengths of large language models while mitigating single-agent limitations. Finally, we examine current limitations - such as error propagation and context scaling - and outline future work toward more robust, scalable multi-agent AI systems for software engineering automation.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 26, 2025

Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering

LLM-based Multi-Agent (LLM-MA) systems are increasingly applied to automate complex software engineering tasks such as requirements engineering, code generation, and testing. However, their operational efficiency and resource consumption remain poorly understood, hindering practical adoption due to unpredictable costs and environmental impact. To address this, we conduct an analysis of token consumption patterns in an LLM-MA system within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), aiming to understand where tokens are consumed across distinct software engineering activities. We analyze execution traces from 30 software development tasks performed by the ChatDev framework using a GPT-5 reasoning model, mapping its internal phases to distinct development stages (Design, Coding, Code Completion, Code Review, Testing, and Documentation) to create a standardized evaluation framework. We then quantify and compare token distribution (input, output, reasoning) across these stages. Our preliminary findings show that the iterative Code Review stage accounts for the majority of token consumption for an average of 59.4% of tokens. Furthermore, we observe that input tokens consistently constitute the largest share of consumption for an average of 53.9%, providing empirical evidence for potentially significant inefficiencies in agentic collaboration. Our results suggest that the primary cost of agentic software engineering lies not in initial code generation but in automated refinement and verification. Our novel methodology can help practitioners predict expenses and optimize workflows, and it directs future research toward developing more token-efficient agent collaboration protocols.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 19

Towards an Understanding of Large Language Models in Software Engineering Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn widespread attention and research due to their astounding performance in tasks such as text generation and reasoning. Derivative products, like ChatGPT, have been extensively deployed and highly sought after. Meanwhile, the evaluation and optimization of LLMs in software engineering tasks, such as code generation, have become a research focus. However, there is still a lack of systematic research on the application and evaluation of LLMs in the field of software engineering. Therefore, this paper is the first to comprehensively investigate and collate the research and products combining LLMs with software engineering, aiming to answer two questions: (1) What are the current integrations of LLMs with software engineering? (2) Can LLMs effectively handle software engineering tasks? To find the answers, we have collected related literature as extensively as possible from seven mainstream databases, and selected 123 papers for analysis. We have categorized these papers in detail and reviewed the current research status of LLMs from the perspective of seven major software engineering tasks, hoping this will help researchers better grasp the research trends and address the issues when applying LLMs. Meanwhile, we have also organized and presented papers with evaluation content to reveal the performance and effectiveness of LLMs in various software engineering tasks, providing guidance for researchers and developers to optimize.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

Generating a Low-code Complete Workflow via Task Decomposition and RAG

AI technologies are moving rapidly from research to production. With the popularity of Foundation Models (FMs) that generate text, images, and video, AI-based systems are increasing their complexity. Compared to traditional AI-based software, systems employing FMs, or GenAI-based systems, are more difficult to design due to their scale and versatility. This makes it necessary to document best practices, known as design patterns in software engineering, that can be used across GenAI applications. Our first contribution is to formalize two techniques, Task Decomposition and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as design patterns for GenAI-based systems. We discuss their trade-offs in terms of software quality attributes and comment on alternative approaches. We recommend to AI practitioners to consider these techniques not only from a scientific perspective but also from the standpoint of desired engineering properties such as flexibility, maintainability, safety, and security. As a second contribution, we describe our industry experience applying Task Decomposition and RAG to build a complex real-world GenAI application for enterprise users: Workflow Generation. The task of generating workflows entails generating a specific plan using data from the system environment, taking as input a user requirement. As these two patterns affect the entire AI development cycle, we explain how they impacted the dataset creation, model training, model evaluation, and deployment phases.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
Nov 29, 2024 2

AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development

The landscape of software development has witnessed a paradigm shift with the advent of AI-powered assistants, exemplified by GitHub Copilot. However, existing solutions are not leveraging all the potential capabilities available in an IDE such as building, testing, executing code, git operations, etc. Therefore, they are constrained by their limited capabilities, primarily focusing on suggesting code snippets and file manipulation within a chat-based interface. To fill this gap, we present AutoDev, a fully automated AI-driven software development framework, designed for autonomous planning and execution of intricate software engineering tasks. AutoDev enables users to define complex software engineering objectives, which are assigned to AutoDev's autonomous AI Agents to achieve. These AI agents can perform diverse operations on a codebase, including file editing, retrieval, build processes, execution, testing, and git operations. They also have access to files, compiler output, build and testing logs, static analysis tools, and more. This enables the AI Agents to execute tasks in a fully automated manner with a comprehensive understanding of the contextual information required. Furthermore, AutoDev establishes a secure development environment by confining all operations within Docker containers. This framework incorporates guardrails to ensure user privacy and file security, allowing users to define specific permitted or restricted commands and operations within AutoDev. In our evaluation, we tested AutoDev on the HumanEval dataset, obtaining promising results with 91.5% and 87.8% of Pass@1 for code generation and test generation respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in automating software engineering tasks while maintaining a secure and user-controlled development environment.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024 2

Human-AI Synergy in Agentic Code Review

Code review is a critical software engineering practice where developers review code changes before integration to ensure code quality, detect defects, and improve maintainability. In recent years, AI agents that can understand code context, plan review actions, and interact with development environments have been increasingly integrated into the code review process. However, there is limited empirical evidence to compare the effectiveness of AI agents and human reviewers in collaborative workflows. To address this gap, we conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of 278,790 code review conversations across 300 open-source GitHub projects. In our study, we aim to compare the feedback differences provided by human reviewers and AI agents. We investigate human-AI collaboration patterns in review conversations to understand how interaction shapes review outcomes. Moreover, we analyze the adoption of code suggestions provided by human reviewers and AI agents into the codebase and how adopted suggestions change code quality. We find that human reviewers provide additional feedback than AI agents, including understanding, testing, and knowledge transfer. Human reviewers exchange 11.8% more rounds when reviewing AI-generated code than human-written code. Moreover, code suggestions made by AI agents are adopted into the codebase at a significantly lower rate than suggestions proposed by human reviewers. Over half of unadopted suggestions from AI agents are either incorrect or addressed through alternative fixes by developers. When adopted, suggestions provided by AI agents produce significantly larger increases in code complexity and code size than suggestions provided by human reviewers. Our findings suggest that while AI agents can scale defect screening, human oversight remains critical for ensuring suggestion quality and providing contextual feedback that AI agents lack.

Continual Learning Bench: Evaluating Frontier AI Systems in Real-World Stateful Environments

Continual learning, the ability of AI systems to improve through sequential experience, has attracted substantial interest, but no high-quality benchmark exists to evaluate it. We introduce Continual Learning Bench (CL-Bench), the first difficult, expert-validated benchmark designed to measure whether LLM-based systems genuinely improve with experience. CL-Bench spans six diverse domains (software engineering, signal processing, disease outbreak forecasting, database querying, strategic game-playing, and demand forecasting), each validated by domain experts and designed so that tasks share a learnable latent structure (codebase layout, disease outbreak dynamics, opponent strategies) that a stateful system can discover online but a stateless one cannot. We evaluate frontier models across several agent architectures, from naive in-context learning (ICL) to dedicated memory systems, introducing a gain metric to isolate learning from prior capabilities. We find that these systems leave headroom for improved continual learning: agents frequently overfit to immediate observations or fail to reuse knowledge across instances, and dedicated memory systems do not fix this -- in fact, naive ICL outperforms systems dedicated to memory management. CL-Bench is the first benchmark to evaluate continual learning across diverse real-world domains with expert-validated tasks and isolate online learning from underlying model capability, showing a need for better continual learning systems.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 3

A Practical Guide to Agentic AI Transition in Organizations

Agentic AI represents a significant shift in how intelligence is applied within organizations, moving beyond AI-assisted tools toward autonomous systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across workflows. As these systems mature, they have the potential to automate a substantial share of manual organizational processes, fundamentally reshaping how work is designed, executed, and governed. Although many organizations have adopted AI to improve productivity, most implementations remain limited to isolated use cases and human-centered, tool-driven workflows. Despite increasing awareness of agentic AI's strategic importance, engineering teams and organizational leaders often lack clear guidance on how to operationalize it effectively. Key challenges include an overreliance on traditional software engineering practices, limited integration of business-domain knowledge, unclear ownership of AI-driven workflows, and the absence of sustainable human-AI collaboration models. Consequently, organizations struggle to move beyond experimentation, scale agentic systems, and align them with tangible business value. Drawing on practical experience in designing and deploying agentic AI workflows across multiple organizations and business domains, this paper proposes a pragmatic framework for transitioning organizational functions from manual processes to automated agentic AI systems. The framework emphasizes domain-driven use case identification, systematic delegation of tasks to AI agents, AI-assisted construction of agentic workflows, and small, AI-augmented teams working closely with business stakeholders. Central to the approach is a human-in-the-loop operating model in which individuals act as orchestrators of multiple AI agents, enabling scalable automation while maintaining oversight, adaptability, and organizational control.

  • 17 authors
·
Jan 26

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18

Security in the Age of AI Teammates: An Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests on GitHub

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly deployed as AI teammates in modern software engineering, independently authoring pull requests (PRs) that modify production code at scale. This study aims to systematically characterize how autonomous coding agents contribute to software security in practice, how these security-related contributions are reviewed and accepted, and which observable signals are associated with PR rejection. We conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of agent-authored PRs using the AIDev dataset, comprising of over 33,000 curated PRs from popular GitHub repositories. Security-relevant PRs are identified using a keyword filtering strategy, followed by manual validation, resulting in 1,293 confirmed security-related agentic-PRs. We then analyze prevalence, acceptance outcomes, and review latency across autonomous agents, programming ecosystems, and types of code changes. Moreover, we apply qualitative open coding to identify recurring security-related actions and underlying intents, and examine review metadata to identify early signals associated with PR rejection. Security-related Agentic-PRs constitute a meaningful share of agent activity (approximately 4\%). Rather than focusing solely on narrow vulnerability fixes, agents most frequently perform supportive security hardening activities, including testing, documentation, configuration, and improved error handling. Compared to non-security PRs, security-related Agentic-PRs exhibit lower merge rates and longer review latency, reflecting heightened human scrutiny, with variation across agents and programming ecosystems. PR rejection is more strongly associated with PR complexity and verbosity than with explicit security topics.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 1

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multi-Language Software Vulnerability Detection

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in software engineering, addressing numerous long-standing challenges. However, a comprehensive study examining the capabilities of LLMs in software vulnerability detection (SVD), a crucial aspect of software security, is currently lacking. Existing research primarily focuses on evaluating LLMs using C/C++ datasets. It typically explores only one or two strategies among prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning for open-source LLMs. Consequently, there is a significant knowledge gap regarding the effectiveness of diverse LLMs in detecting vulnerabilities across various programming languages. To address this knowledge gap, we present a comprehensive empirical study evaluating the performance of LLMs on the SVD task. We have compiled a comprehensive dataset comprising 8,260 vulnerable functions in Python, 7,505 in Java, and 28,983 in JavaScript. We assess five open-source LLMs using multiple approaches, including prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning. These LLMs are benchmarked against five fine-tuned small language models and two open-source static application security testing tools. Furthermore, we explore two avenues to improve LLM performance on SVD: a) Data perspective: Retraining models using downsampled balanced datasets. b) Model perspective: Investigating ensemble learning methods that combine predictions from multiple LLMs. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SVD remains a challenging task for LLMs. This study provides a thorough understanding of the role of LLMs in SVD and offers practical insights for future advancements in leveraging generative AI to enhance software security practices.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025 2

Will It Survive? Deciphering the Fate of AI-Generated Code in Open Source

The integration of AI agents as coding assistants into software development has raised questions about the long-term viability of AI agent-generated code. A prevailing hypothesis within the software engineering community suggests this code is "disposable", meaning it is merged quickly but discarded shortly thereafter. If true, organizations risk shifting maintenance burden from generation to post-deployment remediation. We investigate this hypothesis through survival analysis of 201 open-source projects, tracking over 200,000 code units authored by AI agents versus humans. Contrary to the disposable code narrative, agent-authored code survives significantly longer: at the line level, it exhibits a 15.8 percentage-point lower modification rate and 16% lower hazard of modification (HR = 0.842, p < 0.001). However, modification profiles differ. Agent-authored code shows modestly elevated corrective rates (26.3% vs. 23.0%), while human code shows higher adaptive rates. However, the effect sizes are small (Cramér's V = 0.116), and per-agent variation exceeds the agent-human gap. Turning to prediction, textual features can identify modification-prone code (AUC-ROC = 0.671), but predicting when modifications occur remains challenging (Macro F1 = 0.285), suggesting timing depends on external organizational dynamics. The bottleneck for agent-generated code may not be generation quality, but the organizational practices that govern its long-term evolution.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 23

RExBench: Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions?

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for performing sophisticated software engineering tasks autonomously. In addition, there has been progress towards developing agents that can perform parts of the research pipeline in machine learning and the natural sciences. We argue that research extension and its implementation is a critical capability for such systems, and introduce RExBench to support the evaluation of this capability. RExBench is a benchmark consisting of 12 realistic research experiment implementation tasks that aim to investigate research hypotheses that have not previously been implemented. Each task is set up as an extension to an existing research paper and codebase, accompanied by domain expert-written instructions. RExBench is robust to data contamination, and supports an automatic evaluation infrastructure that executes agent outputs to determine whether the success criteria are met. We use this benchmark to evaluate nine LLM agents implemented using three different frameworks: aider, Claude Code, and OpenHands. We find that all agents evaluated fail to autonomously implement the majority of the extensions. Although the success rate improves with additional human-written hints, the best performance under this setting remains below 40%. This indicates that current agents are still short of being able to handle realistic research extension tasks without substantial human guidance.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 27, 2025 1

Is Your AI-Generated Code Really Safe? Evaluating Large Language Models on Secure Code Generation with CodeSecEval

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advancements to code generation and code repair, benefiting both novice and experienced developers. However, their training using unsanitized data from open-source repositories, like GitHub, raises the risk of inadvertently propagating security vulnerabilities. Despite numerous studies investigating the safety of code LLMs, there remains a gap in comprehensively addressing their security features. In this work, we aim to present a comprehensive study aimed at precisely evaluating and enhancing the security aspects of code LLMs. To support our research, we introduce CodeSecEval, a meticulously curated dataset designed to address 44 critical vulnerability types with 180 distinct samples. CodeSecEval serves as the foundation for the automatic evaluation of code models in two crucial tasks: code generation and code repair, with a strong emphasis on security. Our experimental results reveal that current models frequently overlook security issues during both code generation and repair processes, resulting in the creation of vulnerable code. In response, we propose different strategies that leverage vulnerability-aware information and insecure code explanations to mitigate these security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our findings highlight that certain vulnerability types particularly challenge model performance, influencing their effectiveness in real-world applications. Based on these findings, we believe our study will have a positive impact on the software engineering community, inspiring the development of improved methods for training and utilizing LLMs, thereby leading to safer and more trustworthy model deployment.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 2, 2024

From Labor to Collaboration: A Methodological Experiment Using AI Agents to Augment Research Perspectives in Taiwan's Humanities and Social Sciences

Generative AI is reshaping knowledge work, yet existing research focuses predominantly on software engineering and the natural sciences, with limited methodological exploration for the humanities and social sciences. Positioned as a "methodological experiment," this study proposes an AI Agent-based collaborative research workflow (Agentic Workflow) for humanities and social science research. Taiwan's Claude.ai usage data (N = 7,729 conversations, November 2025) from the Anthropic Economic Index (AEI) serves as the empirical vehicle for validating the feasibility of this methodology. This study operates on two levels: the primary level is the design and validation of a methodological framework - a seven-stage modular workflow grounded in three principles: task modularization, human-AI division of labor, and verifiability, with each stage delineating clear roles for human researchers (research judgment and ethical decisions) and AI Agents (information retrieval and text generation); the secondary level is the empirical analysis of AEI Taiwan data - serving as an operational demonstration of the workflow's application to secondary data research, showcasing both the process and output quality (see Appendix A). This study contributes by proposing a replicable AI collaboration framework for humanities and social science researchers, and identifying three operational modes of human-AI collaboration - direct execution, iterative refinement, and human-led - through reflexive documentation of the operational process. This taxonomy reveals the irreplaceability of human judgment in research question formulation, theoretical interpretation, contextualized reasoning, and ethical reflection. Limitations including single-platform data, cross-sectional design, and AI reliability risks are acknowledged.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 19

Aime: Towards Fully-Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025

ESAA-Security: An Event-Sourced, Verifiable Architecture for Agent-Assisted Security Audits of AI-Generated Code

AI-assisted software generation has increased development speed, but it has also amplified a persistent engineering problem: systems that are functionally correct may still be structurally insecure. In practice, prompt-based security review with large language models often suffers from uneven coverage, weak reproducibility, unsupported findings, and the absence of an immutable audit trail. The ESAA architecture addresses a related governance problem in agentic software engineering by separating heuristic agent cognition from deterministic state mutation through append-only events, constrained outputs, and replay-based verification. This paper presents ESAA-Security, a domain-specific specialization of ESAA for agent-assisted security auditing of software repositories, with particular emphasis on AI-generated or AI-modified code. ESAA-Security structures auditing as a governed execution pipeline with four phases reconnaissance, domain audit execution, risk classification, and final reporting and operationalizes the workflow into 26 tasks, 16 security domains, and 95 executable checks. The framework produces structured check results, vulnerability inventories, severity classifications, risk matrices, remediation guidance, executive summaries, and a final markdown/JSON audit report. The central idea is that security review should not be modeled as a free-form conversation with an LLM, but as an evidence-oriented audit process governed by contracts and events. In ESAA-Security, agents emit structured intentions under constrained protocols; the orchestrator validates them, persists accepted outputs to an append-only log, reprojects derived views, and verifies consistency through replay and hashing. The result is a traceable, reproducible, and risk-oriented audit architecture whose final report is auditable by construction.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 5

Generative AI and Large Language Models for Cyber Security: All Insights You Need

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the future of cybersecurity through Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). We explore LLM applications across various domains, including hardware design security, intrusion detection, software engineering, design verification, cyber threat intelligence, malware detection, and phishing detection. We present an overview of LLM evolution and its current state, focusing on advancements in models such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Mixtral-8x7B, BERT, Falcon2, and LLaMA. Our analysis extends to LLM vulnerabilities, such as prompt injection, insecure output handling, data poisoning, DDoS attacks, and adversarial instructions. We delve into mitigation strategies to protect these models, providing a comprehensive look at potential attack scenarios and prevention techniques. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of 42 LLM models in cybersecurity knowledge and hardware security, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. We thoroughly evaluate cybersecurity datasets for LLM training and testing, covering the lifecycle from data creation to usage and identifying gaps for future research. In addition, we review new strategies for leveraging LLMs, including techniques like Half-Quadratic Quantization (HQQ), Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Quantized Low-Rank Adapters (QLoRA), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). These insights aim to enhance real-time cybersecurity defenses and improve the sophistication of LLM applications in threat detection and response. Our paper provides a foundational understanding and strategic direction for integrating LLMs into future cybersecurity frameworks, emphasizing innovation and robust model deployment to safeguard against evolving cyber threats.

  • 6 authors
·
May 21, 2024

Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Coding Agents

Agentic coding tools, such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, are transforming the software engineering landscape. These AI-powered systems function as autonomous teammates capable of planning and executing complex development tasks. Agents have become active participants in refactoring, a cornerstone of sustainable software development aimed at improving internal code quality without altering observable behavior. Despite their increasing adoption, there is a critical lack of empirical understanding regarding how agentic refactoring is utilized in practice, how it compares to human-driven refactoring, and what impact it has on code quality. To address this empirical gap, we present a large-scale study of AI agent-generated refactorings in real-world open-source Java projects, analyzing 15,451 refactoring instances across 12,256 pull requests and 14,988 commits derived from the AIDev dataset. Our empirical analysis shows that refactoring is a common and intentional activity in this development paradigm, with agents explicitly targeting refactoring in 26.1% of commits. Analysis of refactoring types reveals that agentic efforts are dominated by low-level, consistency-oriented edits, such as Change Variable Type (11.8%), Rename Parameter (10.4%), and Rename Variable (8.5%), reflecting a preference for localized improvements over the high-level design changes common in human refactoring. Additionally, the motivations behind agentic refactoring focus overwhelmingly on internal quality concerns, with maintainability (52.5%) and readability (28.1%). Furthermore, quantitative evaluation of code quality metrics shows that agentic refactoring yields small but statistically significant improvements in structural metrics, particularly for medium-level changes, reducing class size and complexity (e.g., Class LOC median Δ = -15.25).

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025 2

From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

3100 Opinions on Code Review in an AI World: Building Causal Theory from Practitioner Discourse

Coding agents now author entire pull requests, and practitioners sharply disagree about what this does to code review: whether it becomes the bottleneck, whether human review is still necessary, and whether it quietly erodes the understanding that it once built. Repository-mining studies measure surface trends but seldom explain the mechanisms beneath them, and the trends themselves prove unstable. A motivating observational analysis of public GITHUB activity finds that agent-authored pull requests are reviewed less often, merged several times faster, and discussed less than human-authored ones, yet the direction of these trends flips under different but equally defensible analysis choices, so the traces establish what is changing without explaining why. To recover the mechanisms, we synthesize practitioner discourse at scale into an explanatory theory: we collect 38,709 grey-literature documents (engineering blogs and Reddit threads), filter to those substantively about code review, and code a stratified random sample of 3,100 with an LLM-assisted pipeline, from which we build a causal model of 26 constructs and 67 relationships (64 directed, 3 contested). Its organizing claim is that review is the control point through which a coding agent's effect on software is decided, and that AI does not fix the sign of that effect: the team sets it, through the expertise its humans bring and how it structures the review process. The theory makes the competing positions explicit and turns "AI is changing code review" into falsifiable propositions with named constructs and moderators. As a secondary contribution, we offer the underlying LLM-assisted, grey-literature theory-building method as a scalable template for software-engineering research, with a public implementation.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 7

AgentCgroup: Understanding and Controlling OS Resources of AI Agents

AI agents are increasingly deployed in multi-tenant cloud environments, where they execute diverse tool calls within sandboxed containers, each call with distinct resource demands and rapid fluctuations. We present a systematic characterization of OS-level resource dynamics in sandboxed AI coding agents, analyzing 144 software engineering tasks from the SWE-rebench benchmark across two LLM models. Our measurements reveal that (1) OS-level execution (tool calls, container and agent initialization) accounts for 56-74% of end-to-end task latency; (2) memory, not CPU, is the concurrency bottleneck; (3) memory spikes are tool-call-driven with a up to 15.4x peak-to-average ratio; and (4) resource demands are highly unpredictable across tasks, runs, and models. Comparing these characteristics against serverless, microservice, and batch workloads, we identify three mismatches in existing resource controls: a granularity mismatch (container-level policies vs. tool-call-level dynamics), a responsiveness mismatch (user-space reaction vs. sub-second unpredictable bursts), and an adaptability mismatch (history-based prediction vs. non-deterministic stateful execution). We propose AgentCgroup, an intent-driven eBPF-based resource controller that exploits agents ability to declare resource needs and reconstruct execution strategies, using hierarchical cgroup structures aligned with tool-call boundaries, in-kernel enforcement via sched_ext and memcg_bpf_ops, and runtime-adaptive policies. Preliminary evaluation demonstrates improved multi-tenant isolation and reduced resource waste. AgentCgroup is open-source at https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/agentcgroup

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 9

Eyla: Toward an Identity-Anchored LLM Architecture with Integrated Biological Priors -- Vision, Implementation Attempt, and Lessons from AI-Assisted Development

We present the design rationale, implementation attempt, and failure analysis of Eyla, a proposed identity-anchored LLM architecture that integrates biologically-inspired subsystems -- including HiPPO-initialized state-space models, zero-initialized adapters, episodic memory retrieval, and calibrated uncertainty training -- into a unified agent operating system running on consumer hardware. Unlike existing approaches that optimize models for generic helpfulness, Eyla targets identity consistency: the ability to maintain a coherent self-model under adversarial pressure, admit uncertainty, and resist manipulation. We propose the Identity Consistency Score (ICS), a novel benchmark for evaluating this property across LLMs. We then present an honest account of attempting to implement this architecture using AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor) as a non-programmer, documenting a $1,000+ failure that produced a 1.27B parameter model with 86 brain subsystems contributing less than 2% to output. Our analysis identifies five systematic failure modes of AI-assisted development for novel architectures and offers concrete recommendations. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to combine an architectural vision with a documented first-person failure analysis of AI-assisted LLM development, providing lessons for both the AI systems and AI-assisted software engineering communities.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 9

Towards Realistic Project-Level Code Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration and Semantic Architecture Modeling

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in automated code generation. In real-world software engineering, the growing demand for rapid iteration and continuous delivery underscores the importance of project-level code generation, where LLMs are expected to generate complete software projects directly from complex user requirements. Although existing studies have made initial explorations, they still face key limitations, including unrealistic datasets and unreliable evaluation metrics that fail to reflect real-world complexity, the semantic gap between human-written requirements and machine-interpretable structures, and difficulties in managing hierarchical dependencies and maintaining quality throughout the generation process. To address these limitations, we first introduce CodeProjectEval, a project-level code generation dataset built from 18 real-world repositories with 12.7 files and 2,388.6 lines of code per task on average, supplemented with documentation and executable test cases for automatic evaluation. We further propose ProjectGen, a multi-agent framework that decomposes projects into architecture design, skeleton generation, and code filling stages with iterative refinement and memory-based context management. Within this framework, we introduce the Semantic Software Architecture Tree (SSAT), a structured and semantically rich representation that effectively bridges user requirements and source code implementation. Experiments show that ProjectGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, passing 52/124 test cases on the small-scale project-level code generation dataset DevBench, a 57% improvement over the baseline approaches, and 310 test cases on CodeProjectEval, representing an improvement of roughly tenfold compared to the baselines.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

Verified Synthesis of Optimal Safety Controllers for Human-Robot Collaboration

We present a tool-supported approach for the synthesis, verification and validation of the control software responsible for the safety of the human-robot interaction in manufacturing processes that use collaborative robots. In human-robot collaboration, software-based safety controllers are used to improve operational safety, e.g., by triggering shutdown mechanisms or emergency stops to avoid accidents. Complex robotic tasks and increasingly close human-robot interaction pose new challenges to controller developers and certification authorities. Key among these challenges is the need to assure the correctness of safety controllers under explicit (and preferably weak) assumptions. Our controller synthesis, verification and validation approach is informed by the process, risk analysis, and relevant safety regulations for the target application. Controllers are selected from a design space of feasible controllers according to a set of optimality criteria, are formally verified against correctness criteria, and are translated into executable code and validated in a digital twin. The resulting controller can detect the occurrence of hazards, move the process into a safe state, and, in certain circumstances, return the process to an operational state from which it can resume its original task. We show the effectiveness of our software engineering approach through a case study involving the development of a safety controller for a manufacturing work cell equipped with a collaborative robot.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2021

MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention

We introduce MiniMax-M1, the world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model. MiniMax-M1 is powered by a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture combined with a lightning attention mechanism. The model is developed based on our previous MiniMax-Text-01 model, which contains a total of 456 billion parameters with 45.9 billion parameters activated per token. The M1 model natively supports a context length of 1 million tokens, 8x the context size of DeepSeek R1. Furthermore, the lightning attention mechanism in MiniMax-M1 enables efficient scaling of test-time compute. These properties make M1 particularly suitable for complex tasks that require processing long inputs and thinking extensively. MiniMax-M1 is trained using large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) on diverse problems including sandbox-based, real-world software engineering environments. In addition to M1's inherent efficiency advantage for RL training, we propose CISPO, a novel RL algorithm to further enhance RL efficiency. CISPO clips importance sampling weights rather than token updates, outperforming other competitive RL variants. Combining hybrid-attention and CISPO enables MiniMax-M1's full RL training on 512 H800 GPUs to complete in only three weeks, with a rental cost of just $534,700. We release two versions of MiniMax-M1 models with 40K and 80K thinking budgets respectively, where the 40K model represents an intermediate phase of the 80K training. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our models are comparable or superior to strong open-weight models such as the original DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B, with particular strengths in complex software engineering, tool utilization, and long-context tasks. We publicly release MiniMax-M1 at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M1.

  • 127 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025 6

Who Writes the Docs in SE 3.0? Agent vs. Human Documentation Pull Requests

As software engineering moves toward SE3.0, AI agents are increasingly used to carry out development tasks and contribute changes to software projects. It is therefore important to understand the extent of these contributions and how human developers review and intervene, since these factors shape the risks of delegating work to AI agents. While recent studies have examined how AI agents support software development tasks (e.g., code generation, issue resolution, and PR automation), their role in documentation tasks remains underexplored-even though documentation is widely consumed and shapes how developers understand and use software. Using the AIDev, we analyze 1,997 documentation-related pull requests (PRs) authored by AI agents and human developers, where documentation PRs are those that create or modify project documentation artifacts. We find that AI agents submit substantially more documentation-related PRs than humans in the studied repositories. We further observe that agent-authored documentation edits are typically integrated with little follow-up modification from humans, raising concerns about review practices and the reliability of agent-generated documentation. Overall, while AI agents already contribute substantially to documentation workflows, our results suggest concerns for emerging challenges for documentation quality assurance and human-AI collaboration in SE3.0.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 27

PostTrainBench: Can LLM Agents Automate LLM Post-Training?

AI agents have become surprisingly proficient at software engineering over the past year, largely due to improvements in reasoning capabilities. This raises a deeper question: can these systems extend their capabilities to automate AI research itself? In this paper, we explore post-training, the critical phase that turns base LLMs into useful assistants. We introduce PostTrainBench to benchmark how well LLM agents can perform post-training autonomously under bounded compute constraints (10 hours on one H100 GPU). We ask frontier agents (e.g., Claude Code with Opus 4.6) to optimize the performance of a base LLM on a particular benchmark (e.g., Qwen3-4B on AIME). Importantly, we do not provide any predefined strategies to the agents and instead give them full autonomy to find necessary information on the web, run experiments, and curate data. We find that frontier agents make substantial progress but generally lag behind instruction-tuned LLMs from leading providers: 23.2% for the best agent vs. 51.1% for official instruction-tuned models. However, agents can exceed instruction-tuned models in targeted scenarios: GPT-5.1 Codex Max achieves 89% on BFCL with Gemma-3-4B vs. 67% for the official model. We also observe several failure modes worth flagging. Agents sometimes engage in reward hacking: training on the test set, downloading existing instruction-tuned checkpoints instead of training their own, and using API keys they find to generate synthetic data without authorization. These behaviors are concerning and highlight the importance of careful sandboxing as these systems become more capable. Overall, we hope PostTrainBench will be useful for tracking progress in AI R&D automation and for studying the risks that come with it. Website and code are available at https://posttrainbench.com/.

A Survey of Large Language Models for Code: Evolution, Benchmarking, and Future Trends

General large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential in tasks such as code generation in software engineering. This has led to the development of specialized LLMs for software engineering, known as Code LLMs. A considerable portion of Code LLMs is derived from general LLMs through model fine-tuning. As a result, Code LLMs are often updated frequently and their performance can be influenced by the base LLMs. However, there is currently a lack of systematic investigation into Code LLMs and their performance. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of the types of Code LLMs and their differences in performance compared to general LLMs. We aim to address three questions: (1) What LLMs are specifically designed for software engineering tasks, and what is the relationship between these Code LLMs? (2) Do Code LLMs really outperform general LLMs in software engineering tasks? (3) Which LLMs are more proficient in different software engineering tasks? To answer these questions, we first collect relevant literature and work from five major databases and open-source communities, resulting in 134 works for analysis. Next, we categorize the Code LLMs based on their publishers and examine their relationships with general LLMs and among themselves. Furthermore, we investigate the performance differences between general LLMs and Code LLMs in various software engineering tasks to demonstrate the impact of base models and Code LLMs. Finally, we comprehensively maintained the performance of LLMs across multiple mainstream benchmarks to identify the best-performing LLMs for each software engineering task. Our research not only assists developers of Code LLMs in choosing base models for the development of more advanced LLMs but also provides insights for practitioners to better understand key improvement directions for Code LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 17, 2023

HyClone: Bridging LLM Understanding and Dynamic Execution for Semantic Code Clone Detection

Code clone detection is a critical task in software engineering, aimed at identifying duplicated or similar code fragments within or across software systems. Traditional methods often fail to capture functional equivalence, particularly for semantic clones (Type 4), where code fragments implement identical functionality despite differing syntactic structures. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in understanding code semantics. However, directly applying LLMs to code clone detection yields suboptimal results due to their sensitivity to syntactic differences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework that combines LLM-based screening with execution-based validation for detecting semantic clones in Python programs. In the first stage, an LLM evaluates code pairs to filter out obvious non-clones based on semantic analysis. For pairs not identified as clones, the second stage employs an execution-based validation approach, utilizing LLM-generated test inputs to assess functional equivalence through cross-execution validation. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score compared to direct LLM-based detection, highlighting the framework's effectiveness in identifying semantic clones. Future work includes exploring cross-language clone detection and optimizing the framework for large-scale applications.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 2, 2025

Code Summarization Beyond Function Level

Code summarization is a critical task in natural language processing and software engineering, which aims to generate concise descriptions of source code. Recent advancements have improved the quality of these summaries, enhancing code readability and maintainability. However, the content of a repository or a class has not been considered in function code summarization. This study investigated the effectiveness of code summarization models beyond the function level, exploring the impact of class and repository contexts on the summary quality. The study involved revising benchmarks for evaluating models at class and repository levels, assessing baseline models, and evaluating LLMs with in-context learning to determine the enhancement of summary quality with additional context. The findings revealed that the fine-tuned state-of-the-art CodeT5+ base model excelled in code summarization, while incorporating few-shot learning and retrieved code chunks from RAG significantly enhanced the performance of LLMs in this task. Notably, the Deepseek Coder 1.3B and Starcoder2 15B models demonstrated substantial improvements in metrics such as BLEURT, METEOR, and BLEU-4 at both class and repository levels. Repository-level summarization exhibited promising potential but necessitates significant computational resources and gains from the inclusion of structured context. Lastly, we employed the recent SIDE code summarization metric in our evaluation. This study contributes to refining strategies for prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and RAG, addressing gaps in benchmarks for code summarization at various levels. Finally, we publish all study details, code, datasets, and results of evaluation in the GitHub repository available at https://github.com/kilimanj4r0/code-summarization-beyond-function-level.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 23, 2025

Agentic Proof and Property-Based Testing via Property-Templates in Data-Intensive Computing

As the cost of code generation becomes cheaper with AI, the new bottleneck in software engineering has shifted to intent specification and validation. Overcoming this durability crisis of AI-driven coding requires more than traditional fuzzing: each candidate property must be proven correct over a model and shown to hold on the real implementation, making formal proof and systematic property-based testing (PBT) complementary. However, validating properties this way at scale requires solving two subproblems: verifying candidate properties and operationalizing PBT without AI hallucination. We hypothesize that recurring property patterns, cast as property templates--abstract, parameterized forms with holes--address both at once. This paper investigates recurring property patterns in Apache Spark. In data-intensive scalable computing systems, correctness properties arise from the principles of data partition, computation decomposition, and dataflow computation. For instance, aggregation decomposition relates a global function executed on the entire dataset to a local function followed by a recombiner. We design an agentic, dual-track validation framework that uses property templates to formally verify correctness in the Lean 4 theorem prover and instantiate PBT templates as executable PySpark tests. Our evaluation shows that property templates increase agentic proof engineering success by up to 2.6x (1.6x on average) and reduce proof hallucinations by 59%. Template-guided PBT synthesis reduces intent misalignments from 22 to 1 and cuts synthesis cost by up to 5.7x (3.8x on average). Template-guided synthesis further exceeds a state-of-the-art Spark fuzzer and approaches unguided LLM-based PBT on code coverage. Finally, comparing the two tracks is informative: when a proof succeeds yet a PBT finds a counterexample, the mismatch identifies a gap between the formal model and implementation.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 9

AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvement

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless, software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum-based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite (300 real-life GitHub issues) show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (19% on SWE-bench-lite), which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported SWE-agent. In addition, AutoCodeRover achieved this efficacy with significantly lower cost (on average, $0.43 USD), compared to other baselines. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 8, 2024

Balancing Label Quantity and Quality for Scalable Elicitation

Scalable oversight studies methods of training and evaluating AI systems in domains where human judgment is unreliable or expensive, such as scientific research and software engineering in complex codebases. Most work in this area has focused on methods of improving the quality of labels. Recent work by Burns et al. (2023) considers the complementary problem of training models with low-quality labels, finding that large pretrained models often have an inductive bias towards producing correct answers. In practice, however, neither label quantity nor quality is fixed: practitioners face a quantity-quality tradeoff. In this paper, we explore the microeconomics of the quantity-quality tradeoff on binary NLP classification tasks used in Burns et al. (2023). While sample-efficient learning has been studied extensively, little public research has focused on scalable elicitation: eliciting capabilities from pretrained models subject to labeling cost constraints. We find that this setting has novel dynamics caused by the tradeoff between label quantity and quality, as well as the model's existing latent capabilities. We observe three regimes of eliciting classification knowledge from pretrained models using supervised finetuning: quantity-dominant, quality-dominant, and a mixed regime involving the use of low- and high-quality data together to attain higher accuracy at a lower cost than using either alone. We explore sample-efficient elicitation methods that make use of two datasets of differing qualities, and establish a Pareto frontier of scalable elicitation methods that optimally trade off labeling cost and classifier performance. We find that the accuracy of supervised fine-tuning can be improved by up to 5 percentage points at a fixed labeling budget by adding a few-shot prompt to make use of the model's existing knowledge of the task.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

CodeTF: One-stop Transformer Library for State-of-the-art Code LLM

Code intelligence plays a key role in transforming modern software engineering. Recently, deep learning-based models, especially Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable potential in tackling these tasks by leveraging massive open-source code data and programming language features. However, the development and deployment of such models often require expertise in both machine learning and software engineering, creating a barrier for the model adoption. In this paper, we present CodeTF, an open-source Transformer-based library for state-of-the-art Code LLMs and code intelligence. Following the principles of modular design and extensible framework, we design CodeTF with a unified interface to enable rapid access and development across different types of models, datasets and tasks. Our library supports a collection of pretrained Code LLM models and popular code benchmarks, including a standardized interface to train and serve code LLMs efficiently, and data features such as language-specific parsers and utility functions for extracting code attributes. In this paper, we describe the design principles, the architecture, key modules and components, and compare with other related library tools. Finally, we hope CodeTF is able to bridge the gap between machine learning/generative AI and software engineering, providing a comprehensive open-source solution for developers, researchers, and practitioners.

  • 6 authors
·
May 31, 2023

Large Language Models for Cyber Security: A Systematic Literature Review

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities for leveraging artificial intelligence in various domains, including cybersecurity. As the volume and sophistication of cyber threats continue to grow, there is an increasing need for intelligent systems that can automatically detect vulnerabilities, analyze malware, and respond to attacks. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on the application of LLMs in cybersecurity (LLM4Security). By comprehensively collecting over 30K relevant papers and systematically analyzing 127 papers from top security and software engineering venues, we aim to provide a holistic view of how LLMs are being used to solve diverse problems across the cybersecurity domain. Through our analysis, we identify several key findings. First, we observe that LLMs are being applied to a wide range of cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability detection, malware analysis, network intrusion detection, and phishing detection. Second, we find that the datasets used for training and evaluating LLMs in these tasks are often limited in size and diversity, highlighting the need for more comprehensive and representative datasets. Third, we identify several promising techniques for adapting LLMs to specific cybersecurity domains, such as fine-tuning, transfer learning, and domain-specific pre-training. Finally, we discuss the main challenges and opportunities for future research in LLM4Security, including the need for more interpretable and explainable models, the importance of addressing data privacy and security concerns, and the potential for leveraging LLMs for proactive defense and threat hunting. Overall, our survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in LLM4Security and identifies several promising directions for future research.

  • 9 authors
·
May 7, 2024