arXiv:2609.37864v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agent harness bugs exhibit unique characteristics and remain challenging for state-of-the-art software agents to repair. Progress in this area is fur...
By Yiming Cheng (The University of Chicago), Alfin Wijaya Rahardja (Fudan University), Mengshi Zhang (TensorBlock, Inc), Zihao Chen (TensorBlock, Inc), Zhenpeng Chen (Tsinghua University), Yiling Lou (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
arXiv:2607. 00990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based software engineering agents are increasingly developed to resolve software issues by generating patches from issue reports and code repositories.
By Yaoqi Guo, Yang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Yun Ma, Yiling Lou, Zhenpeng Chen
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
arXiv:2609.36635v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Bug validation asks a coding agent to produce an executable witness for a reported bug. The witness combines a concrete input with a testing harness...
By Haomin Qi, Xiangzhe Xu, Yiming Huang, Jingbo Shang, Chengpeng Wang
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:2608. 04682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in software engineering (SWE) scenarios, capable of fixing a specific bug in large-scale codebase.
By Haobin Li, Ping Deng, Weizhong Qian, Liang Jiang, Zhenyu Huang, Mouxing Yang, Xi Peng