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6arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·44h ago

SHERLOC: Training-free structured fault localization framework boosts code repair agent performance on SWE-Bench

SHERLOC is a training-free localization framework that pairs a reasoning LLM with compact repository tools to produce structured diagnostic context for code repair agents, rather than bare file pointers. It achieves 84.33% accuracy@1 on SWE-Bench Lite and 81.27% recall@1 on SWE-Bench Verified at ~30B parameters, matching or outperforming larger agentic methods. Injecting SHERLOC's diagnostic output into downstream repair agents yields an average +5.95 percentage point resolve rate improvement on SWE-Bench Verified while reducing localization tokens by 36.7% and total tokens by 23.1%. The work addresses a concrete inefficiency in agentic coding pipelines where roughly half the inference budget is spent on fault localization before any editing begins.

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5arXiv · cs.CL·9d ago·source ↗

Post-hoc falsification operators for frozen small code models fail to beat Best-of-N in leakage-free evaluation

A measurement study evaluates 26 post-hoc operators (selection, verification, repair, elimination, portfolios) applied to frozen small code models (≤1.5B parameters) against a Best-of-N baseline under a strict leakage-free, matched-compute protocol. None of the semantic operators improves held-out accuracy over BoN, with the failure traced to three structural mechanisms: a coverage wall, a capability scissors, and a near-empty consensus trap. Two non-semantic operators do provide value: an expression-layer recovery method (M1) lifts DeepSeek-Coder-1.3B by +12 tasks on HumanEval+ (p=2.4e-4), and an adaptive consensus early-stop saves ~19% compute with no accuracy harm. The paper's core lesson is that harness quality and coverage measurement should precede investment in semantic post-hoc reasoning.

5arXiv · cs.LG·6d ago·source ↗

Probe-and-Refine Tuning improves coding agent performance via iterative repository guidance refinement

A new arXiv paper introduces probe-and-refine tuning, a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively improve AGENTS.md repository guidance files for LLM-based coding agents without requiring an agent loop during tuning. Evaluated on SWE-bench Verified with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, the method achieves 33.0% mean resolve rate versus 28.3% for a static knowledge base baseline and 25.5% for an unguided baseline. The improvement is attributed to coverage gains—refined guidance helps agents locate the correct files rather than improving patch quality—and a step-budget experiment shows guidance is necessary for agents to productively use larger compute budgets.

4arXiv · cs.CL·2d ago·source ↗

P4IR framework uses SFT + GRPO to improve LLM-based automated building code compliance

Researchers introduce P4IR, a two-stage framework combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve LLM accuracy in automated code compliance (ACC) for building regulations. The approach reduces tree edit distance and token-level Levenshtein distance by up to 23.8% and 38.6% respectively versus SFT baselines, and outperforms Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, Qwen-3-Max, and GLM-4.7 in zero-shot settings. The work targets a narrow but practically important domain where LLM hallucinations carry real regulatory consequences.

5arXiv · cs.CL·14d ago·source ↗

Claw-SWE-Bench: A benchmark for evaluating agent harnesses on multilingual coding tasks

Researchers introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol designed to fairly compare heterogeneous agent harnesses ("claws") on GitHub issue-resolution tasks. The benchmark contains 350 instances across 8 languages and 43 repositories, with an 80-instance Lite subset for cost-efficient validation. Key findings show adapter design dominates raw model choice: a minimal adapter scores 19.1% Pass@1 versus 73.4% for a full adapter using the same GLM 5.1 backbone, and harness choice and model choice each shift Pass@1 by roughly 27-29 percentage points. The work also introduces cost accounting as a first-class evaluation axis alongside accuracy.

4arXiv · cs.AI·1mo ago·source ↗

Structure-Aware Code Change Labeling with LLMs via Two-Stage Taxonomy Pipeline

This paper presents a systematic study of using LLMs for taxonomy-based labeling of code diff hunks, going beyond summarization to assign structured labels capturing semantic attributes like renames, moves, and logic modifications. The authors introduce a two-stage pipeline combining diff-hunk labeling with structural refinement, using few-shot prompting to remain language-agnostic. Evaluated across four LLMs on a curated benchmark of natural and synthetic patches, the best configuration achieves 84% recall and 81% precision. Results suggest LLM-based structured labeling can complement static analysis tools in code review workflows.

5arXiv · cs.CL·17d ago·source ↗

SWE-Explore: New benchmark isolates repository exploration capability in coding agents

SWE-Explore is a new benchmark targeting repository exploration as a distinct, fine-grained capability of coding agents, separate from end-to-end task resolution. It covers 848 issues across 10 programming languages and 203 open-source repositories, with line-level ground truth derived from successful agent trajectories. Evaluation across retrieval methods, coding agents, and specialized localizers finds that agentic explorers outperform classical retrieval, and that line-level coverage and efficient ranking remain the key differentiators at the frontier. The benchmark addresses a gap in SWE-bench-style evaluations that treat task resolution as a binary outcome.

5arXiv · cs.LG·8d ago·source ↗

ReproRepo: Scalable LLM agent framework for reproducibility auditing using GitHub issues

ReproRepo is a new framework for evaluating LLM agents on reproducibility auditing of ML research, using naturally occurring GitHub issues as supervision signals rather than costly manual curation. The framework is instantiated on 1,149 recent ML papers from major conferences and benchmarks four frontier model-agent configurations. The best-performing agent (Codex with GPT-5.5) surfaces at least one semantically related human-reported reproduction blocker for ~90% of papers, though exact localization of issues remains a weakness. The work provides a reusable, scalable evaluation harness for this underexplored agentic task.

6arXiv · cs.CL·14h ago·source ↗

ToolBench-X benchmarks LLM agents under tool-environment unreliability

A new arXiv preprint introduces ToolBench-X, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents under five structured hazard types including Specification Drift, Invocation Error, Execution Failure, Output Drift, and Cross-source Conflict. Each injected hazard remains solvable via recovery paths such as retrying, fallback, or cross-checking, enabling measurement of agent resilience rather than just function-call accuracy. Experiments reveal a substantial reliability gap: agents that perform well in clean environments frequently fail under recoverable hazards, with failures driven by poor hazard diagnosis rather than insufficient tool-use volume or inference budget. The findings argue for shifting tool-use evaluation toward task completion under realistic, unreliable conditions.