arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

SWE-Gate: Passing Functional Tests Is Not Enough for Software Engineering Agents

SWE‑Gate is a new repository‑level benchmark that evaluates software engineering agents on both functional correctness and review‑derived acceptance constraints. It creates 303 repair instances from real pull‑request review comments across 75 open‑source Python projects, providing separate functional and constraint tests along with compliant and non‑compliant patches. Experiments with four LLM backends show that while 644 repairs pass functional tests, 221 fail to meet the review constraints, highlighting a gap between functional success and full repair compliance.

By Xin He, Yanlin Wang, Mingwei Liu, Jiachi Chen, Hongyu Zhang, Guanbin Li
arXiv AI
Sep 4

PatchBench: Evaluating AI Agents for Vulnerability Patching

PatchBench introduces a benchmark to evaluate AI agents on realistic vulnerability patching tasks, addressing two key threats to validity: patch memorization and surface-level fixes that merely suppress crashes. The study finds that 25% of agent patches resemble historical developer patches, and that PoC-only validation inflates success rates by 1.83× on average. PatchBench mitigates these issues by selecting vulnerabilities whose true fixes lie outside the crash stack, migrating historical vulnerabilities into new contexts, and employing rigorous validation for security and semantic correctness.

By Chihao Shen, Jiacheng Li, Aastha Mahajan, Jeffery Siyuan Tian, Yonghwi Kwon, Yizheng Chen