arXiv AI

From Dead Code and Static Requirements to Working Engines: Software Revival with Coding Agents

The paper introduces ReviveBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate coding agents’ ability to revive non‑running software and reconstruct industrial engines from open specifications. It comprises two families of tasks—revival (ten tasks addressing dependency issues, missing modules, legacy builds, and GPU models) and reconstruction (thirteen tasks covering numerical, geometric, hardware, and transactional systems). The benchmark uses hidden verifiers calibrated against native environments, engineering tools, or reference implementations, and the authors report that the strongest evaluated model passes all revival tasks and most reconstruction tasks, while also uncovering verifier defects that highlight measurement error in executable verification.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

The paper examines how large‑language‑model (LLM) decompilers, which produce clean, idiomatic C code, are currently evaluated mainly on recompilability and passing shipped tests. It shows that these metrics can mask significant behavioral differences: a decompiled function may recompile and pass all tests yet diverge on other inputs or lose disclosed vulnerabilities. To address this, the authors propose Decompile‑Diverge, a behavioral oracle that synthesizes drivers, fuzzes inputs, and compares the decompiled code’s behavior to the original, revealing divergences in up to 13% of cases and exposing gaps in current evaluation suites.

By Chang Liu, Edward Raff, Kristopher Micinski
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rebuild Dossier: Mechanically-Enforced Specs for Agentic App Rebuilds, and What Model-Tier Failures Reveal

The paper introduces rebuild‑dossier, an open‑source tool that locks an application’s real interface before code is written and enforces one‑test‑at‑a‑time building through automated checks. In experiments, a compliant agent failed a held‑back test while a rule‑breaking agent passed, showing that a passing test suite can be gamed. The study also demonstrates that the automated check mechanism, rather than interface‑locking alone, is crucial for reliable rebuilds, and that multi‑level verification catches errors that single‑level checks miss.

By Parker Fawcett
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Specification-first convergence with an AI coding agent: a case study of dismantling a core architectural invariant across 189 files in a 717k-line codebase with no test oracle and no human code review

arXiv:2608. 12440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reports a single, fully instrumented case study of a large-scale architectural refactoring by an AI coding agent under a specification-first protocol, with no human review of the generated code and no pre-existing oracle to validate the target behaviour.

By Joel Abenhaim
arXiv AI
3d ago

E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch

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 AI
Jul 17

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

arXiv:2607. 14896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report.

By Sizhong Qin, Yi Gu, Yao Jiang, Ao Cai, Changjian Zhou, Shaoxuan Shuai, Jiachang Wang, Tianhao Shen, Yueqiang Li, Xinhao Li, Li Zeng, Yueshi Chen, Dachen Gao, Genrong Xu, Wenjie Liao, Xinzheng Lu
arXiv AI
3d ago

Zero2Repo: Can Coding Agents Build Repositories from Scratch?

arXiv:2609.38269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents are increasingly asked to build software rather than patch it, yet benchmarks for from-scratch repository construction are mostly limit...

By Pei Yang, Tianyu Shi, Yuhang Yao, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang, Dun Pei, Haonan Wang, Pengbin Feng, Guanxu Yu, Jingchun Huang, Zeyu Zhang, Shuhan Sun, Hao Li, Xiang Li, Jie Xiao, Xinyu Wang, Hanxin Chen, Daqi Li, Qi Jia, Hongshan Lin, Zhizhou Gu, Zijun Tian, Weizhi Du, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang