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
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. 19799v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Software increasingly functions as part of the scientific instrument itself, making failures in scientific code capable of compromising not only program behavior but also the evidence underlying scientific conclusions.
By Zhipeng Xu, Jiahao Lu, Yining Zheng, Yuxin Wang, Xipeng Qiu
arXiv:2608. 09072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-powered coding agents are increasingly used to modify existing code repositories, for example, by adding features or fixing bugs.
By Xin Zhou, Chun Yong Chong, Kisub Kim, Yun Peng, Rui Shu, Zihan Wu, Xu Han, Guowen Yuan, Zeyang Zhuang, Jounghoon Kim, Jeongjin Ju, Seongmin Ju, Taein Yoon, David Lo
SWE‑bench Science is a benchmark for evaluating coding agents on scientific software engineering tasks, comprising 119 tasks from 98 GitHub repositories across 20 scientific domains. The tasks are grouped into Issue‑driven, Expert‑exploratory, and Engineering‑integration paradigms, and even the best agent, Claude Code with Opus‑5 (max), achieves a pass@1 below 50%. The study identifies four common failure mechanisms—lack of scientific knowledge, misguided exploration, incomplete repair coverage, and poor generalization—and shows that providing scientific guidance can both help and hinder repair depending on its alignment with the task.
arXiv:2607. 12605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have improved automated program repair (APR), but two limitations remain.
By Zhili Huang, Ling Xu, Hongyu Zhang