REFINE is a tool-agnostic, evidence-aware multi-agent approach that generates Java file-level refactoring candidates by combining static analysis, smell-informed planning, LLM-based transformation, and automated re-analysis. In experiments on 450 Java files from 15 open-source systems, REFINE reduced detected code smells by 68–73% across three LLM configurations, achieving higher median reductions with smaller edits compared to a direct-prompt baseline. However, the tool’s outputs still pose risks such as assert/fail-call changes and public-method removal, requiring compilation, testing, dependency analysis, and human review before deployment.
By Muhammad Waseem, Aakash Ahmad, Pekka Abrahamsson
RefactorPlatform is an open‑source harness that standardizes the evaluation of repository‑scale refactoring agents by fixing the environment and systematically varying design choices such as model backbone, execution regime, and prompt specificity. Each run operates in an isolated workspace, logs detailed telemetry, and verifies changes with AST‑based checks. Experiments on 100 RefactorBench tasks show that AST‑aware chunking improves performance by 25‑30%, a lean retrieval‑augmented single agent outperforms a sub‑agent configuration, and retrieval’s accuracy gains offset its token overhead, keeping cost per successful refactoring unchanged.
By Aziz Ben Amor, Drish Mali, Mann Acharya, Vijayasri Iyer, S\'ebastien Brati\`eres
arXiv:2506. 13932v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks.
By Saurabh Pujar, Ira Ceka, Irene Manotas, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray, Shyam Ramji
arXiv:2509. 24148v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside implementation.
By Yiran Hu, Nan Jiang, Shanchao Liang, Yi Wu, Lin Tan
arXiv:2606. 30949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-Level Synthesis (HLS) provides a fast path from concepts to silicon, but converting real-world software into synthesizable HLS code remains challenging due to restrictive language support and the gap between software and hardware programming practices.
By Yang Zou, Zijian Ding, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong
BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.
By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang
E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.
By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou
arXiv:2602. 22480v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An important emerging application of coding agents is agent harness optimization: the iterative improvement of a target agent by editing and evaluating its code.
By Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue, Samuel Marc Denton
arXiv:2604. 01527v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Production deployment of AI coding agents requires fast, reproducible evaluation signals.
By Smriti Jha, Matteo Paltenghi, Chandra Maddila, Vijayaraghavan Murali, Shubham Ugare, Satish Chandra
arXiv:2507. 22080v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Acquiring high-quality instruction-code pairs is essential for training Large Language Models for code generation.
By Qiushi Sun, Jinyang Gong, Lei Li, Qipeng Guo, Fei Yuan
The paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) handle bug fixing compared to human-written patches by analyzing about 3,000 Codeforces submissions. It finds that LLMs often modify more lines than necessary and sometimes produce entirely new solutions, and that they solve more problems correctly when generating solutions from scratch rather than patching existing code. The study highlights implications for AI‑assisted programming tools, suggesting a shift toward incremental problem‑solving strategies.
arXiv:2507. 11059v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset.
By Pavel Adamenko, Mikhail Ivanov, Aidar Valeev, Rodion Levichev, Pavel Zadorozhny, Ivan Lopatin, Dmitry Babaev, Alena Fenogenova, Valentin Malykh