arXiv AI

Learning Globally Reusable Skills for Coding Agents

arXiv:2608. 06153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated skill evolution enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to continuously improve without expensive retraining.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Understanding Automated Program Repair Agents Through the Lens of Traceability: An Empirical Study

The paper presents a systematic analysis of five state‑of‑the‑art automated program repair agents, tracing their decision‑making across 500 real‑world repair tasks. It finds that while the agents perform well on simple fixes, they struggle with logic‑intensive bugs, often producing verbose, overfitted patches that pass tests without addressing root causes. Key bottlenecks identified include poor test generation, limited regression test selection, and reliance on primitive tooling without access to debuggers or advanced program analysis tools.

By Ira Ceka, Hailie Mitchell, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Shyam Ramji, Junfeng Yang, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray
arXiv AI
6d ago

SkillEvoReg: Regularizing Agent Skill Evolution Against Overfitting

SkillEvoReg is a regularization framework designed to mitigate overfitting in language-model agents that evolve reusable external skills. It combines training-time skill dropout, complexity-aware local regularization, and causal counterexample validation to control skill-state growth and detect regressions. Applied across SkillOpt, SkillEvolBench, and ContinualSkillBench, it preserves downstream performance while improving transfer and later-stage evolution outcomes.

By Guanyu Nie, Fangzhou Zhu, Shixiong Kai, Xiongwei Han, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan
arXiv AI
Aug 11

FailForge: Distilling Procedural Competence from Persistent Failures into Code Agents

arXiv:2608. 08570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rejection sampling fine-tuning (RFT) is widely used to train code agents by generating trajectories on verifiable software engineering tasks, retaining those that pass the tests, and fine-tuning on the successful rollouts.

By Dongyi Lv, Fushun E, Aichen Cai, Liang Huang, Ya Zhang, Qiuyu Ding, Canhui Wu, Zhi Wang, Yuesong Zhang, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RL

arXiv:2512. 18552v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While current software agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and agentic reinforcement learning (RL) can boost programmer productivity, their training data (e.

By Yuxiang Wei, Zhiqing Sun, Emily McMilin, Jonas Gehring, David Zhang, Gabriel Synnaeve, Daniel Fried, Lingming Zhang, Sida Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself

arXiv:2609.22068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training capable coding agents via reinforcement learning (RL) requires diverse tasks with reliable verifiers. Open-source codebases offer a rich sourc...

By Bowen Ye, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Zihao Yue, Linghao Zhang, Hanglong Lv, Yuanxin Liu, Wenhan Ma, Hao Tian, Rang Li, Jinhao Dong, Yikai Zhao, Xiangwei Deng, Hailin Zhang, Liang Zhao, Qi Liu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Yang, Fuli Luo
arXiv AI
6d ago

CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agents

CODESKILL is an LLM-based framework that learns to extract, evolve, and maintain procedural skills from coding-agent trajectories. It treats skill extraction and skill-bank management as a learnable policy trained with reinforcement learning, using a hybrid reward combining rubric-based skill quality and verifiable execution feedback. Experiments on EnvBench, SWE-Bench Verified, and Terminal-Bench 2 demonstrate that CODESKILL raises average pass rates by 11.03 over a no-skill baseline and by 5.10 over the strongest prompt-based or memory baseline while keeping a compact skill bank.

By Yanzhou Li, Yiran Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Xiaoxia Liu, Yang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution

arXiv:2607. 08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The behavior of an LLM agent is determined not only by the underlying model, but also by its harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies intermediate results, and recovers from failures.

By Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Song, Qianshu Cai, Dahai Yu, Yike Guo, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han