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Jan 9

Multi-Agent Software Development through Cross-Team Collaboration

The latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), eg., ChatDev, have catalyzed profound transformations, particularly through multi-agent collaboration for software development. LLM agents can collaborate in teams like humans, and follow the waterfall model to sequentially work on requirements analysis, development, review, testing, and other phases to perform autonomous software generation. However, for an agent team, each phase in a single development process yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently, this may lead to obtaining suboptimal results. To address this challenge, we introduce Cross-Team Collaboration (CTC), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various decisions and communicate with their insights in a cross-team collaboration environment for superior content generation. Experimental results in software development reveal a notable increase in quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring the efficacy of our framework. The significant improvements in story generation demonstrate the promising generalization ability of our framework across various domains. We anticipate that our work will guide LLM agents towards a cross-team paradigm and contribute to their significant growth in but not limited to software development. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents

Recent advances in coding agents suggest rapid progress toward autonomous software development, yet existing benchmarks fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon capabilities required to build complete software systems. Most prior evaluations focus on localized code generation, scaffolded completion, or short-term repair tasks, leaving open the question of whether agents can sustain coherent reasoning, planning, and execution over the extended horizons demanded by real-world repository construction. To address this gap, we present NL2Repo Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the long-horizon repository generation ability of coding agents. Given only a single natural-language requirements document and an empty workspace, agents must autonomously design the architecture, manage dependencies, implement multi-module logic, and produce a fully installable Python library. Our experiments across state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models reveal that long-horizon repository generation remains largely unsolved: even the strongest agents achieve below 40% average test pass rates and rarely complete an entire repository correctly. Detailed analysis uncovers fundamental long-horizon failure modes, including premature termination, loss of global coherence, fragile cross-file dependencies, and inadequate planning over hundreds of interaction steps. NL2Repo Bench establishes a rigorous, verifiable testbed for measuring sustained agentic competence and highlights long-horizon reasoning as a central bottleneck for the next generation of autonomous coding agents.

  • 48 authors
·
Dec 14, 2025 2

SWE-Dev: Evaluating and Training Autonomous Feature-Driven Software Development

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capability in diverse software engineering tasks, e.g. code completion, bug fixing, and document generation. However, feature-driven development (FDD), a highly prevalent real-world task that involves developing new functionalities for large, existing codebases, remains underexplored. We therefore introduce SWE-Dev, the first large-scale dataset (with 14,000 training and 500 test samples) designed to evaluate and train autonomous coding systems on real-world feature development tasks. To ensure verifiable and diverse training, SWE-Dev uniquely provides all instances with a runnable environment and its developer-authored executable unit tests. This collection not only provides high-quality data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), but also enables Reinforcement Learning (RL) by delivering accurate reward signals from executable unit tests. Our extensive evaluations on SWE-Dev, covering 17 chatbot LLMs, 10 reasoning models, and 10 Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), reveal that FDD is a profoundly challenging frontier for current AI (e.g., Claude-3.7-Sonnet achieves only 22.45\% Pass@3 on the hard test split). Crucially, we demonstrate that SWE-Dev serves as an effective platform for model improvement: fine-tuning on training set enabled a 7B model comparable to GPT-4o on hard split, underscoring the value of its high-quality training data. Code is available here https://github.com/justLittleWhite/SWE-Dev{https://github.com/justLittleWhite/SWE-Dev}.

  • 9 authors
·
May 22, 2025 1

From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

From LLMs to LLM-based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey of Current, Challenges and Future

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 5, 2024

The Rise of AI Teammates in Software Engineering (SE) 3.0: How Autonomous Coding Agents Are Reshaping Software Engineering

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

Rethinking Autonomy: Preventing Failures in AI-Driven Software Engineering

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

SuperCoder2.0: Technical Report on Exploring the feasibility of LLMs as Autonomous Programmer

We present SuperCoder2.0, an advanced autonomous system designed to enhance software development through artificial intelligence. The system combines an AI-native development approach with intelligent agents to enable fully autonomous coding. Key focus areas include a retry mechanism with error output traceback, comprehensive code rewriting and replacement using Abstract Syntax Tree (ast) parsing to minimize linting issues, code embedding technique for retrieval-augmented generation, and a focus on localizing methods for problem-solving rather than identifying specific line numbers. The methodology employs a three-step hierarchical search space reduction approach for code base navigation and bug localization:utilizing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and a Repository File Level Map to identify candidate files, (2) narrowing down to the most relevant files using a File Level Schematic Map, and (3) extracting 'relevant locations' within these files. Code editing is performed through a two-part module comprising CodeGeneration and CodeEditing, which generates multiple solutions at different temperature values and replaces entire methods or classes to maintain code integrity. A feedback loop executes repository-level test cases to validate and refine solutions. Experiments conducted on the SWE-bench Lite dataset demonstrate SuperCoder2.0's effectiveness, achieving correct file localization in 84.33% of cases within the top 5 candidates and successfully resolving 34% of test instances. This performance places SuperCoder2.0 fourth globally on the SWE-bench leaderboard. The system's ability to handle diverse repositories and problem types highlights its potential as a versatile tool for autonomous software development. Future work will focus on refining the code editing process and exploring advanced embedding models for improved natural language to code mapping.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2024

AutoDev: Automated AI-Driven Development

The landscape of software development has witnessed a paradigm shift with the advent of AI-powered assistants, exemplified by GitHub Copilot. However, existing solutions are not leveraging all the potential capabilities available in an IDE such as building, testing, executing code, git operations, etc. Therefore, they are constrained by their limited capabilities, primarily focusing on suggesting code snippets and file manipulation within a chat-based interface. To fill this gap, we present AutoDev, a fully automated AI-driven software development framework, designed for autonomous planning and execution of intricate software engineering tasks. AutoDev enables users to define complex software engineering objectives, which are assigned to AutoDev's autonomous AI Agents to achieve. These AI agents can perform diverse operations on a codebase, including file editing, retrieval, build processes, execution, testing, and git operations. They also have access to files, compiler output, build and testing logs, static analysis tools, and more. This enables the AI Agents to execute tasks in a fully automated manner with a comprehensive understanding of the contextual information required. Furthermore, AutoDev establishes a secure development environment by confining all operations within Docker containers. This framework incorporates guardrails to ensure user privacy and file security, allowing users to define specific permitted or restricted commands and operations within AutoDev. In our evaluation, we tested AutoDev on the HumanEval dataset, obtaining promising results with 91.5% and 87.8% of Pass@1 for code generation and test generation respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in automating software engineering tasks while maintaining a secure and user-controlled development environment.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI

This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.

  • 3 authors
·
May 25, 2025 2

Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the automation of software development tasks, including code synthesis, program repair, and test generation. More recently, researchers and industry practitioners have developed various autonomous LLM agents to perform end-to-end software development tasks. These agents are equipped with the ability to use tools, run commands, observe feedback from the environment, and plan for future actions. However, the complexity of these agent-based approaches, together with the limited abilities of current LLMs, raises the following question: Do we really have to employ complex autonomous software agents? To attempt to answer this question, we build Agentless -- an agentless approach to automatically solve software development problems. Compared to the verbose and complex setup of agent-based approaches, Agentless employs a simplistic two-phase process of localization followed by repair, without letting the LLM decide future actions or operate with complex tools. Our results on the popular SWE-bench Lite benchmark show that surprisingly the simplistic Agentless is able to achieve both the highest performance (27.33%) and lowest cost (\$0.34) compared with all existing open-source software agents! Furthermore, we manually classified the problems in SWE-bench Lite and found problems with exact ground truth patch or insufficient/misleading issue descriptions. As such, we construct SWE-bench Lite-S by excluding such problematic issues to perform more rigorous evaluation and comparison. Our work highlights the current overlooked potential of a simple, interpretable technique in autonomous software development. We hope Agentless will help reset the baseline, starting point, and horizon for autonomous software agents, and inspire future work along this crucial direction.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024 7

Live-SWE-agent: Can Software Engineering Agents Self-Evolve on the Fly?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping almost all industries, including software engineering. In recent years, a number of LLM agents have been proposed to solve real-world software problems. Such software agents are typically equipped with a suite of coding tools and can autonomously decide the next actions to form complete trajectories to solve end-to-end software tasks. While promising, they typically require dedicated design and may still be suboptimal, since it can be extremely challenging and costly to exhaust the entire agent scaffold design space. Recognizing that software agents are inherently software themselves that can be further refined/modified, researchers have proposed a number of self-improving software agents recently, including the Darwin-Gödel Machine (DGM). Meanwhile, such self-improving agents require costly offline training on specific benchmarks and may not generalize well across different LLMs or benchmarks. In this paper, we propose Live-SWE-agent, the first live software agent that can autonomously and continuously evolve itself on-the-fly during runtime when solving real-world software problems. More specifically, Live-SWE-agent starts with the most basic agent scaffold with only access to bash tools (e.g., mini-SWE-agent), and autonomously evolves its own scaffold implementation while solving real-world software problems. Our evaluation on the widely studied SWE-bench Verified benchmark shows that Live-SWE-agent can achieve an impressive solve rate of 75.4% without test-time scaling, outperforming all existing open-source software agents and approaching the performance of the best proprietary solution. Moreover, Live-SWE-agent outperforms state-of-the-art manually crafted software agents on the recent SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, achieving the best-known solve rate of 45.8%.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025 2

AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvement

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless, software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum-based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite (300 real-life GitHub issues) show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (19% on SWE-bench-lite), which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported SWE-agent. In addition, AutoCodeRover achieved this efficacy with significantly lower cost (on average, $0.43 USD), compared to other baselines. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 8, 2024

Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RL

While current software agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and agentic reinforcement learning (RL) can boost programmer productivity, their training data (e.g., GitHub issues and pull requests) and environments (e.g., pass-to-pass and fail-to-pass tests) heavily depend on human knowledge or curation, posing a fundamental barrier to superintelligence. In this paper, we present Self-play SWE-RL (SSR), a first step toward training paradigms for superintelligent software agents. Our approach takes minimal data assumptions, only requiring access to sandboxed repositories with source code and installed dependencies, with no need for human-labeled issues or tests. Grounded in these real-world codebases, a single LLM agent is trained via reinforcement learning in a self-play setting to iteratively inject and repair software bugs of increasing complexity, with each bug formally specified by a test patch rather than a natural language issue description. On the SWE-bench Verified and SWE-Bench Pro benchmarks, SSR achieves notable self-improvement (+10.4 and +7.8 points, respectively) and consistently outperforms the human-data baseline over the entire training trajectory, despite being evaluated on natural language issues absent from self-play. Our results, albeit early, suggest a path where agents autonomously gather extensive learning experiences from real-world software repositories, ultimately enabling superintelligent systems that exceed human capabilities in understanding how systems are constructed, solving novel challenges, and autonomously creating new software from scratch.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 20, 2025 2

AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities

AI agentic programming is an emerging paradigm in which large language models (LLMs) autonomously plan, execute, and interact with external tools like compilers, debuggers, and version control systems to iteratively perform complex software development tasks. Unlike conventional code generation tools, agentic systems are capable of decomposing high-level goals, coordinating multi-step processes, and adapting their behavior based on intermediate feedback. These capabilities are transforming the software development practice. As this emerging field evolves rapidly, there is a need to define its scope, consolidate its technical foundations, and identify open research challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of AI agentic programming. We introduce a taxonomy of agent behaviors and system architectures, and examine core techniques including planning, memory and context management, tool integration, and execution monitoring. We also analyze existing benchmarks and evaluation methodologies used to assess coding agent performance. Our study identifies several key challenges, including limitations in handling long context, a lack of persistent memory across tasks, and concerns around safety, alignment with user intent, and collaboration with human developers. We discuss emerging opportunities to improve the reliability, adaptability, and transparency of agentic systems. By synthesizing recent advances and outlining future directions, this survey aims to provide a foundation for research and development in building the next generation of intelligent and trustworthy AI coding agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

RepoMaster: Autonomous Exploration and Understanding of GitHub Repositories for Complex Task Solving

The ultimate goal of code agents is to solve complex tasks autonomously. Although large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation, real-world tasks typically demand full-fledged code repositories rather than simple scripts. Building such repositories from scratch remains a major challenge. Fortunately, GitHub hosts a vast, evolving collection of open-source repositories, which developers frequently reuse as modular components for complex tasks. Yet, existing frameworks like OpenHands and SWE-Agent still struggle to effectively leverage these valuable resources. Relying solely on README files provides insufficient guidance, and deeper exploration reveals two core obstacles: overwhelming information and tangled dependencies of repositories, both constrained by the limited context windows of current LLMs. To tackle these issues, we propose RepoMaster, an autonomous agent framework designed to explore and reuse GitHub repositories for solving complex tasks. For efficient understanding, RepoMaster constructs function-call graphs, module-dependency graphs, and hierarchical code trees to identify essential components, providing only identified core elements to the LLMs rather than the entire repository. During autonomous execution, it progressively explores related components using our exploration tools and prunes information to optimize context usage. Evaluated on the adjusted MLE-bench, RepoMaster achieves a 110% relative boost in valid submissions over the strongest baseline OpenHands. On our newly released GitTaskBench, RepoMaster lifts the task-pass rate from 40.7% to 62.9% while reducing token usage by 95%. Our code and demonstration materials are publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/RepoMaster.

  • 14 authors
·
May 27, 2025

CodeCoR: An LLM-Based Self-Reflective Multi-Agent Framework for Code Generation

Code generation aims to produce code that fulfills requirements written in natural languages automatically. Large language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated promising effectiveness in this area. Nonetheless, these LLMs often fail to ensure the syntactic and semantic correctness of the generated code. Recently, researchers proposed multi-agent frameworks that guide LLMs with different prompts to analyze programming tasks, generate code, perform testing in a sequential workflow. However, the performance of the workflow is not robust as the code generation depends on the performance of each agent. To address this challenge, we propose CodeCoR, a self-reflective multi-agent framework that evaluates the effectiveness of each agent and their collaborations. Specifically, for a given task description, four agents in CodeCoR generate prompts, code, test cases, and repair advice, respectively. Each agent generates more than one output and prunes away the low-quality ones. The generated code is tested in the local environment: the code that fails to pass the generated test cases is sent to the repair agent and the coding agent re-generates the code based on repair advice. Finally, the code that passes the most number of generated test cases is returned to users. Our experiments on four widely used datasets, HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, MBPP, and MBPP-ET, demonstrate that CodeCoR significantly outperforms existing baselines (e.g., CodeCoT and MapCoder), achieving an average Pass@1 score of 77.8%.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 13, 2025

Thinking Longer, Not Larger: Enhancing Software Engineering Agents via Scaling Test-Time Compute

Recent advancements in software engineering agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating program improvements. However, their reliance on closed-source or resource-intensive models introduces significant deployment challenges in private environments, prompting a critical question: How can personally deployable open-source LLMs achieve comparable code reasoning performance? To this end, we propose a unified Test-Time Compute scaling framework that leverages increased inference-time computation instead of larger models. Our framework incorporates two complementary strategies: internal TTC and external TTC. Internally, we introduce a development-contextualized trajectory synthesis method leveraging real-world software repositories to bootstrap multi-stage reasoning processes, such as fault localization and patch generation. We further enhance trajectory quality through rejection sampling, rigorously evaluating trajectories along accuracy and complexity. Externally, we propose a novel development-process-based search strategy guided by reward models and execution verification. This approach enables targeted computational allocation at critical development decision points, overcoming limitations of existing "end-point only" verification methods. Evaluations on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate our 32B model achieves a 46\% issue resolution rate, surpassing significantly larger models such as DeepSeek R1 671B and OpenAI o1. Additionally, we provide the empirical validation of the test-time scaling phenomenon within SWE agents, revealing that models dynamically allocate more tokens to increasingly challenging problems, effectively enhancing reasoning capabilities. We publicly release all training data, models, and code to facilitate future research. https://github.com/yingweima2022/SWE-Reasoner

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

A Comprehensive Survey on Benchmarks and Solutions in Software Engineering of LLM-Empowered Agentic System

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has driven a transition from traditional rule-based systems to autonomous agentic systems capable of solving complex problems. However, systematic progress is hindered by a lack of comprehensive understanding of how benchmarks and solutions interconnect. This survey addresses this gap by providing the first holistic analysis of LLM-powered software engineering, offering insights into evaluation methodologies and solution paradigms. We review over 150 recent papers and propose a taxonomy along two key dimensions: (1) Solutions, categorized into prompt-based, fine-tuning-based, and agent-based paradigms, and (2) Benchmarks, including tasks such as code generation, translation, and repair. Our analysis highlights the evolution from simple prompt engineering to sophisticated agentic systems incorporating capabilities like planning, reasoning, memory mechanisms, and tool augmentation. To contextualize this progress, we present a unified pipeline illustrating the workflow from task specification to deliverables, detailing how different solution paradigms address various complexity levels. Unlike prior surveys that focus narrowly on specific aspects, this work connects 50+ benchmarks to their corresponding solution strategies, enabling researchers to identify optimal approaches for diverse evaluation criteria. We also identify critical research gaps and propose future directions, including multi-agent collaboration, self-evolving systems, and formal verification integration. This survey serves as a foundational guide for advancing LLM-driven software engineering. We maintain a GitHub repository that continuously updates the reviewed and related papers at https://github.com/lisaGuojl/LLM-Agent-SE-Survey.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

Towards Realistic Project-Level Code Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration and Semantic Architecture Modeling

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in automated code generation. In real-world software engineering, the growing demand for rapid iteration and continuous delivery underscores the importance of project-level code generation, where LLMs are expected to generate complete software projects directly from complex user requirements. Although existing studies have made initial explorations, they still face key limitations, including unrealistic datasets and unreliable evaluation metrics that fail to reflect real-world complexity, the semantic gap between human-written requirements and machine-interpretable structures, and difficulties in managing hierarchical dependencies and maintaining quality throughout the generation process. To address these limitations, we first introduce CodeProjectEval, a project-level code generation dataset built from 18 real-world repositories with 12.7 files and 2,388.6 lines of code per task on average, supplemented with documentation and executable test cases for automatic evaluation. We further propose ProjectGen, a multi-agent framework that decomposes projects into architecture design, skeleton generation, and code filling stages with iterative refinement and memory-based context management. Within this framework, we introduce the Semantic Software Architecture Tree (SSAT), a structured and semantically rich representation that effectively bridges user requirements and source code implementation. Experiments show that ProjectGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, passing 52/124 test cases on the small-scale project-level code generation dataset DevBench, a 57% improvement over the baseline approaches, and 310 test cases on CodeProjectEval, representing an improvement of roughly tenfold compared to the baselines.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

AgentMesh: A Cooperative Multi-Agent Generative AI Framework for Software Development Automation

Software development is a complex, multi-phase process traditionally requiring collaboration among individuals with diverse expertise. We propose AgentMesh, a Python-based framework that uses multiple cooperating LLM-powered agents to automate software development tasks. In AgentMesh, specialized agents - a Planner, Coder, Debugger, and Reviewer - work in concert to transform a high-level requirement into fully realized code. The Planner agent first decomposes user requests into concrete subtasks; the Coder agent implements each subtask in code; the Debugger agent tests and fixes the code; and the Reviewer agent validates the final output for correctness and quality. We describe the architecture and design of these agents and their communication, and provide implementation details including prompt strategies and workflow orchestration. A case study illustrates AgentMesh handling a non-trivial development request via sequential task planning, code generation, iterative debugging, and final code review. We discuss how dividing responsibilities among cooperative agents leverages the strengths of large language models while mitigating single-agent limitations. Finally, we examine current limitations - such as error propagation and context scaling - and outline future work toward more robust, scalable multi-agent AI systems for software engineering automation.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 26, 2025

Modularization is Better: Effective Code Generation with Modular Prompting

Large Language Models are transforming software development by automatically generating code. Current prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suggest tasks step by step and the reasoning process follows a linear structure, which hampers the understanding of complex programming problems, particularly those requiring hierarchical solutions. Inspired by the principle of modularization in software development, in this work, we propose a novel prompting technique, called MoT, to enhance the code generation performance of LLMs. At first, MoT exploits modularization principles to decompose complex programming problems into smaller, independent reasoning steps, enabling a more structured and interpretable problem-solving process. This hierarchical structure improves the LLM's ability to comprehend complex programming problems. Then, it structures the reasoning process using an MLR Graph (Multi-Level Reasoning Graph), which hierarchically organizes reasoning steps. This approach enhances modular understanding and ensures better alignment between reasoning steps and the generated code, significantly improving code generation performance. Our experiments on two advanced LLMs (GPT-4o-mini and DeepSeek-R1), comparing MoT to six baseline prompting techniques across six widely used datasets, HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, HumanEval+, MBPP, MBPP-ET, and MBPP+, demonstrate that MoT significantly outperforms existing baselines (e.g., CoT and SCoT), achieving Pass@1 scores ranging from 58.1% to 95.1%. The experimental results confirm that MoT significantly enhances the performance of LLM-based code generation.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 16, 2025

EvoGit: Decentralized Code Evolution via Git-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration

We introduce EvoGit, a decentralized multi-agent framework for collaborative software development driven by autonomous code evolution. EvoGit deploys a population of independent coding agents, each proposing edits to a shared codebase without centralized coordination, explicit message passing, or shared memory. Instead, all coordination emerges through a Git-based phylogenetic graph that tracks the full version lineage and enables agents to asynchronously read from and write to the evolving code repository. This graph-based structure supports fine-grained branching, implicit concurrency, and scalable agent interaction while preserving a consistent historical record. Human involvement is minimal but strategic: users define high-level goals, periodically review the graph, and provide lightweight feedback to promote promising directions or prune unproductive ones. Experiments demonstrate EvoGit's ability to autonomously produce functional and modular software artifacts across two real-world tasks: (1) building a web application from scratch using modern frameworks, and (2) constructing a meta-level system that evolves its own language-model-guided solver for the bin-packing optimization problem. Our results underscore EvoGit's potential to establish a new paradigm for decentralized, automated, and continual software development. EvoGit is open-sourced at https://github.com/BillHuang2001/evogit.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025

Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents

Today's AI systems have human-designed, fixed architectures and cannot autonomously and continuously improve themselves. The advance of AI could itself be automated. If done safely, that would accelerate AI development and allow us to reap its benefits much sooner. Meta-learning can automate the discovery of novel algorithms, but is limited by first-order improvements and the human design of a suitable search space. The G\"odel machine proposed a theoretical alternative: a self-improving AI that repeatedly modifies itself in a provably beneficial manner. Unfortunately, proving that most changes are net beneficial is impossible in practice. We introduce the Darwin G\"odel Machine (DGM), a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code (thereby also improving its ability to modify its own codebase) and empirically validates each change using coding benchmarks. Inspired by Darwinian evolution and open-endedness research, the DGM maintains an archive of generated coding agents. It grows the archive by sampling an agent from it and using a foundation model to create a new, interesting, version of the sampled agent. This open-ended exploration forms a growing tree of diverse, high-quality agents and allows the parallel exploration of many different paths through the search space. Empirically, the DGM automatically improves its coding capabilities (e.g., better code editing tools, long-context window management, peer-review mechanisms), increasing performance on SWE-bench from 20.0% to 50.0%, and on Polyglot from 14.2% to 30.7%. Furthermore, the DGM significantly outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration. All experiments were done with safety precautions (e.g., sandboxing, human oversight). The DGM is a significant step toward self-improving AI, capable of gathering its own stepping stones along paths that unfold into endless innovation.

  • 5 authors
·
May 28, 2025 3

Enhancing LLM Code Generation: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Agent Collaboration and Runtime Debugging for Improved Accuracy, Reliability, and Latency

The use of large language models (LLMs) for automated code generation has emerged as a significant focus within AI research. As these pretrained models continue to evolve, their ability to understand and generate complex code structures has opened new possibilities for automating intricate programming tasks for the sake of accurate code generation. Although contemporary foundational models demonstrate promoting results, researchers continue to explore optimal post-training strategies to enhance code quality. These include supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), debugging, and many others. In this paper, we combine two widely used approaches namely multi-agent collaboration and runtime execution information-based debugging, for improving code generation functionality, reliability, and practical applicability. We perform an empirical study in order to extend the evaluation of the individual strategies as well as the proposed composition of the activities of both strategies. Our study use 19 LLMs to examines the performance of individual and the proposed strategies, offering comprehensive insights into how different programming activities compositions and training paradigms influence code generation effectiveness. In particular, we implement a chained system that combines both strategies to assess their combined impact on functional accuracy, code reliability, and generation latency using two benchmark datasets commonly used for code generation. Our findings provide valuable insights for organizations seeking robust AI-driven coding solutions by guiding them in selecting models that can better adapt to complex post-training strategies, ultimately fostering the adoption of more effective and reliable code generation technologies.

  • 3 authors
·
May 4, 2025

From Reproduction to Replication: Evaluating Research Agents with Progressive Code Masking

Recent progress in autonomous code generation has fueled excitement around AI agents capable of accelerating scientific discovery by running experiments. However, there is currently no benchmark that evaluates whether such agents can implement scientific ideas when given varied amounts of code as a starting point, interpolating between reproduction (running code) and from-scratch replication (fully re-implementing and running code). We introduce AutoExperiment, a benchmark that evaluates AI agents' ability to implement and run machine learning experiments based on natural language descriptions in research papers. In each task, agents are given a research paper, a codebase with key functions masked out, and a command to run the experiment. The goal is to generate the missing code, execute the experiment in a sandboxed environment, and reproduce the results. AutoExperiment scales in difficulty by varying the number of missing functions n, ranging from partial reproduction to full replication. We evaluate state-of-the-art agents and find that performance degrades rapidly as n increases. Agents that can dynamically interact with the environment (e.g. to debug their code) can outperform agents in fixed "agentless" harnesses, and there exists a significant gap between single-shot and multi-trial success rates (Pass@1 vs. Pass@5), motivating verifier approaches to our benchmark. Our findings highlight critical challenges in long-horizon code generation, context retrieval, and autonomous experiment execution, establishing AutoExperiment as a new benchmark for evaluating progress in AI-driven scientific experimentation. Our data and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/j1mk1m/AutoExperiment .

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24, 2025

CodeTree: Agent-guided Tree Search for Code Generation with Large Language Models

Pre-trained on massive amounts of code and text data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements in performing code generation tasks. With additional execution-based feedback, these models can act as agents with capabilities to self-refine and improve generated code autonomously. However, on challenging coding tasks with extremely large search space, current agentic approaches still struggle with multi-stage planning, generating, and debugging. To address this problem, we propose CodeTree, a framework for LLM agents to efficiently explore the search space in different stages of the code generation process. Specifically, we adopted a unified tree structure to explicitly explore different coding strategies, generate corresponding coding solutions, and subsequently refine the solutions. In each stage, critical decision-making (ranking, termination, expanding) of the exploration process is guided by both the environmental execution-based feedback and LLM-agent-generated feedback. We comprehensively evaluated CodeTree on 7 code generation benchmarks and demonstrated the significant performance gains of CodeTree against strong baselines. Using GPT-4o as the base model, we consistently achieved top results of 95.1 on HumanEval, 98.7 on MBPP, and 43.0 on CodeContests. On the challenging SWEBench benchmark, our approach led to significant performance gains.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

  • 21 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025 5

Experimenting with Multi-Agent Software Development: Towards a Unified Platform

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8, 2024

Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control

Large language models (LLMs) trained on code completion have been shown to be capable of synthesizing simple Python programs from docstrings [1]. We find that these code-writing LLMs can be re-purposed to write robot policy code, given natural language commands. Specifically, policy code can express functions or feedback loops that process perception outputs (e.g.,from object detectors [2], [3]) and parameterize control primitive APIs. When provided as input several example language commands (formatted as comments) followed by corresponding policy code (via few-shot prompting), LLMs can take in new commands and autonomously re-compose API calls to generate new policy code respectively. By chaining classic logic structures and referencing third-party libraries (e.g., NumPy, Shapely) to perform arithmetic, LLMs used in this way can write robot policies that (i) exhibit spatial-geometric reasoning, (ii) generalize to new instructions, and (iii) prescribe precise values (e.g., velocities) to ambiguous descriptions ("faster") depending on context (i.e., behavioral commonsense). This paper presents code as policies: a robot-centric formulation of language model generated programs (LMPs) that can represent reactive policies (e.g., impedance controllers), as well as waypoint-based policies (vision-based pick and place, trajectory-based control), demonstrated across multiple real robot platforms. Central to our approach is prompting hierarchical code-gen (recursively defining undefined functions), which can write more complex code and also improves state-of-the-art to solve 39.8% of problems on the HumanEval [1] benchmark. Code and videos are available at https://code-as-policies.github.io

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 16, 2022

You Don't Know Until You Click:Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 17, 2025

From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Practical Guide to Code Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed automated software development by enabling direct translation of natural language descriptions into functional code, driving commercial adoption through tools like Github Copilot (Microsoft), Cursor (Anysphere), Trae (ByteDance), and Claude Code (Anthropic). While the field has evolved dramatically from rule-based systems to Transformer-based architectures, achieving performance improvements from single-digit to over 95\% success rates on benchmarks like HumanEval. In this work, we provide a comprehensive synthesis and practical guide (a series of analytic and probing experiments) about code LLMs, systematically examining the complete model life cycle from data curation to post-training through advanced prompting paradigms, code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and autonomous coding agents. We analyze the code capability of the general LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA) and code-specialized LLMs (StarCoder, Code LLaMA, DeepSeek-Coder, and QwenCoder), critically examining the techniques, design decisions, and trade-offs. Further, we articulate the research-practice gap between academic research (e.g., benchmarks and tasks) and real-world deployment (e.g., software-related code tasks), including code correctness, security, contextual awareness of large codebases, and integration with development workflows, and map promising research directions to practical needs. Last, we conduct a series of experiments to provide a comprehensive analysis of code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, covering scaling law, framework selection, hyperparameter sensitivity, model architectures, and dataset comparisons.

Beihang Beihang University
·
Nov 23, 2025 14

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 3

AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

  • 3 authors
·
May 15, 2025 2

AutoIOT: LLM-Driven Automated Natural Language Programming for AIoT Applications

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has profoundly transformed our lives, revolutionizing interactions with AI and lowering the barrier to AI usage. While LLMs are primarily designed for natural language interaction, the extensive embedded knowledge empowers them to comprehend digital sensor data. This capability enables LLMs to engage with the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, performing a myriad of AIoT tasks. Consequently, this evolution triggers a paradigm shift in conventional AIoT application development, democratizing its accessibility to all by facilitating the design and development of AIoT applications via natural language. However, some limitations need to be addressed to unlock the full potential of LLMs in AIoT application development. First, existing solutions often require transferring raw sensor data to LLM servers, which raises privacy concerns, incurs high query fees, and is limited by token size. Moreover, the reasoning processes of LLMs are opaque to users, making it difficult to verify the robustness and correctness of inference results. This paper introduces AutoIOT, an LLM-based automated program generator for AIoT applications. AutoIOT enables users to specify their requirements using natural language (input) and automatically synthesizes interpretable programs with documentation (output). AutoIOT automates the iterative optimization to enhance the quality of generated code with minimum user involvement. AutoIOT not only makes the execution of AIoT tasks more explainable but also mitigates privacy concerns and reduces token costs with local execution of synthesized programs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate AutoIOT's remarkable capability in program synthesis for various AIoT tasks. The synthesized programs can match and even outperform some representative baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025

SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence

The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose SwarmAgentic, a framework for fully automated agentic system generation that constructs agentic systems from scratch and jointly optimizes agent functionality and collaboration as interdependent components through language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a +261.8% relative improvement over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation. Our code is publicly released at https://yaoz720.github.io/SwarmAgentic/.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 18, 2025 2

OMNI-EPIC: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness with Environments Programmed in Code

Open-ended and AI-generating algorithms aim to continuously generate and solve increasingly complex tasks indefinitely, offering a promising path toward more general intelligence. To accomplish this grand vision, learning must occur within a vast array of potential tasks. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments are constrained within manually predefined, often narrow distributions of environment, limiting their ability to create any learning environment. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework, OMNI-EPIC, that augments previous work in Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI) with Environments Programmed in Code (EPIC). OMNI-EPIC leverages foundation models to autonomously generate code specifying the next learnable (i.e., not too easy or difficult for the agent's current skill set) and interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel) tasks. OMNI-EPIC generates both environments (e.g., an obstacle course) and reward functions (e.g., progress through the obstacle course quickly without touching red objects), enabling it, in principle, to create any simulatable learning task. We showcase the explosive creativity of OMNI-EPIC, which continuously innovates to suggest new, interesting learning challenges. We also highlight how OMNI-EPIC can adapt to reinforcement learning agents' learning progress, generating tasks that are of suitable difficulty. Overall, OMNI-EPIC can endlessly create learnable and interesting environments, further propelling the development of self-improving AI systems and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website with videos: https://dub.sh/omniepic

  • 4 authors
·
May 24, 2024

SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?

Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent's flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 4, 2024

Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with complex tasks. In real-world software development, humans usually tackle complex tasks through collaborative teamwork, a strategy that significantly controls development complexity and enhances software quality. Inspired by this, we present a self-collaboration framework for code generation employing LLMs, exemplified by ChatGPT. Specifically, through role instructions, 1) Multiple LLMs act as distinct ``experts'', each responsible for a specific subtask within a complex task; 2) Specify the way to collaborate and interact, so that different roles form a virtual team to facilitate each other's work, ultimately the virtual team addresses code generation tasks collaboratively without the need for human intervention. To effectively organize and manage this virtual team, we incorporate software-development methodology into the framework. Thus, we assemble an elementary team consisting of three ChatGPT roles (i.e., analyst, coder, and tester) responsible for software development's analysis, coding, and testing stages. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various code-generation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that self-collaboration code generation relatively improves 29.9%-47.1% Pass@1 compared to direct code generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance and even surpassing GPT-4. Moreover, we showcase that self-collaboration could potentially enable LLMs to efficiently handle complex real-world tasks that are not readily solved by direct code generation, as evidenced in case study.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2023

UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action

Multimodal agents for computer use rely exclusively on primitive actions (click, type, scroll) that require accurate visual grounding and lengthy execution chains, leading to cascading failures and performance bottlenecks. While other agents leverage rich programmatic interfaces (APIs, MCP servers, tools), computer-use agents (CUAs) remain isolated from these capabilities. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that bridges this gap through hybrid action -- seamlessly integrating GUI primitives with high-level programmatic tool calls. To achieve this, our approach comprises four key components: (1) an automated pipeline that scales programmatic tools from software documentation, open-source repositories, and code generation; (2) a synthetic data engine producing over 17,000 verifiable tasks spanning real-world computer-use scenarios; (3) a large-scale high-quality hybrid action trajectory collection with both low-level GUI actions and high-level programmatic tool calls; and (4) a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling strategic alternation between low-level and high-level actions. Experiments with our 7B and 32B models demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art agents. On OSWorld, UltraCUA models achieve an average 22% relative improvement over base models, while being 11% faster in terms of steps. Out-of-domain evaluation on WindowsAgentArena shows our model reaches 21.7% success rate, outperforming baselines trained on Windows data. The hybrid action mechanism proves critical, reducing error propagation while maintaining execution efficiency.

apple Apple
·
Oct 20, 2025 2

AutoML-Agent: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Full-Pipeline AutoML

Automated machine learning (AutoML) accelerates AI development by automating tasks in the development pipeline, such as optimal model search and hyperparameter tuning. Existing AutoML systems often require technical expertise to set up complex tools, which is in general time-consuming and requires a large amount of human effort. Therefore, recent works have started exploiting large language models (LLM) to lessen such burden and increase the usability of AutoML frameworks via a natural language interface, allowing non-expert users to build their data-driven solutions. These methods, however, are usually designed only for a particular process in the AI development pipeline and do not efficiently use the inherent capacity of the LLMs. This paper proposes AutoML-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework tailored for full-pipeline AutoML, i.e., from data retrieval to model deployment. AutoML-Agent takes user's task descriptions, facilitates collaboration between specialized LLM agents, and delivers deployment-ready models. Unlike existing work, instead of devising a single plan, we introduce a retrieval-augmented planning strategy to enhance exploration to search for more optimal plans. We also decompose each plan into sub-tasks (e.g., data preprocessing and neural network design) each of which is solved by a specialized agent we build via prompting executing in parallel, making the search process more efficient. Moreover, we propose a multi-stage verification to verify executed results and guide the code generation LLM in implementing successful solutions. Extensive experiments on seven downstream tasks using fourteen datasets show that AutoML-Agent achieves a higher success rate in automating the full AutoML process, yielding systems with good performance throughout the diverse domains.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

CodeChain: Towards Modular Code Generation Through Chain of Self-revisions with Representative Sub-modules

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already become quite proficient at solving simpler programming tasks like those in HumanEval or MBPP benchmarks. However, solving more complex and competitive programming tasks is still quite challenging for these models - possibly due to their tendency to generate solutions as monolithic code blocks instead of decomposing them into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. On the other hand, experienced programmers instinctively write modularized code with abstraction for solving complex tasks, often reusing previously developed modules. To address this gap, we propose CodeChain, a novel framework for inference that elicits modularized code generation through a chain of self-revisions, each being guided by some representative sub-modules generated in previous iterations. Concretely, CodeChain first instructs the LLM to generate modularized codes through chain-of-thought prompting. Then it applies a chain of self-revisions by iterating the two steps: 1) extracting and clustering the generated sub-modules and selecting the cluster representatives as the more generic and re-usable implementations, and 2) augmenting the original chain-of-thought prompt with these selected module-implementations and instructing the LLM to re-generate new modularized solutions. We find that by naturally encouraging the LLM to reuse the previously developed and verified sub-modules, CodeChain can significantly boost both modularity as well as correctness of the generated solutions, achieving relative pass@1 improvements of 35% on APPS and 76% on CodeContests. It is shown to be effective on both OpenAI LLMs as well as open-sourced LLMs like WizardCoder. We also conduct comprehensive ablation studies with different methods of prompting, number of clusters, model sizes, program qualities, etc., to provide useful insights that underpin CodeChain's success.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 13, 2023 1

A Survey of Vibe Coding with Large Language Models

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from code generation assistance to autonomous coding agents, enabling a novel development methodology termed "Vibe Coding" where developers validate AI-generated implementations through outcome observation rather than line-by-line code comprehension. Despite its transformative potential, the effectiveness of this emergent paradigm remains under-explored, with empirical evidence revealing unexpected productivity losses and fundamental challenges in human-AI collaboration. To address this gap, this survey provides the first comprehensive and systematic review of Vibe Coding with large language models, establishing both theoretical foundations and practical frameworks for this transformative development approach. Drawing from systematic analysis of over 1000 research papers, we survey the entire vibe coding ecosystem, examining critical infrastructure components including LLMs for coding, LLM-based coding agent, development environment of coding agent, and feedback mechanisms. We first introduce Vibe Coding as a formal discipline by formalizing it through a Constrained Markov Decision Process that captures the dynamic triadic relationship among human developers, software projects, and coding agents. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we then synthesize existing practices into five distinct development models: Unconstrained Automation, Iterative Conversational Collaboration, Planning-Driven, Test-Driven, and Context-Enhanced Models, thus providing the first comprehensive taxonomy in this domain. Critically, our analysis reveals that successful Vibe Coding depends not merely on agent capabilities but on systematic context engineering, well-established development environments, and human-agent collaborative development models.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025 3

Autonomous Improvement of Instruction Following Skills via Foundation Models

Intelligent instruction-following robots capable of improving from autonomously collected experience have the potential to transform robot learning: instead of collecting costly teleoperated demonstration data, large-scale deployment of fleets of robots can quickly collect larger quantities of autonomous data that can collectively improve their performance. However, autonomous improvement requires solving two key problems: (i) fully automating a scalable data collection procedure that can collect diverse and semantically meaningful robot data and (ii) learning from non-optimal, autonomous data with no human annotations. To this end, we propose a novel approach that addresses these challenges, allowing instruction-following policies to improve from autonomously collected data without human supervision. Our framework leverages vision-language models to collect and evaluate semantically meaningful experiences in new environments, and then utilizes a decomposition of instruction following tasks into (semantic) language-conditioned image generation and (non-semantic) goal reaching, which makes it significantly more practical to improve from this autonomously collected data without any human annotations. We carry out extensive experiments in the real world to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and find that in a suite of unseen environments, the robot policy can be improved significantly with autonomously collected data. We open-source the code for our semantic autonomous improvement pipeline, as well as our autonomous dataset of 30.5K trajectories collected across five tabletop environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 30, 2024

Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025 1

Code-Driven Planning in Grid Worlds with Large Language Models

We propose an iterative programmatic planning (IPP) framework for solving grid-based tasks by synthesizing interpretable agent policies expressed in code using large language models (LLMs). Instead of relying on traditional search or reinforcement learning, our approach uses code generation as policy synthesis, where the LLM outputs executable programs that map environment states to action sequences. Our proposed architecture incorporates several prompting strategies, including direct code generation, pseudocode-conditioned refinement, and curriculum-based prompting, but also includes an iterative refinement mechanism that updates code based on task performance feedback. We evaluate our approach using six leading LLMs and two challenging grid-based benchmarks (GRASP and MiniGrid). Our IPP framework demonstrates improvements over direct code generation ranging from 10\% to as much as 10x across five of the six models and establishes a new state-of-the-art result for GRASP. IPP is found to significantly outperform direct elicitation of a solution from GPT-o3-mini (by 63\% on MiniGrid to 116\% on GRASP), demonstrating the viability of the overall approach. Computational costs of all code generation approaches are similar. While code generation has a higher initial prompting cost compared to direct solution elicitation (\0.08 per task vs. 0.002 per instance for GPT-o3-mini), the code can be reused for any number of instances, making the amortized cost significantly lower (by 400x on GPT-o3-mini across the complete GRASP benchmark).

  • 3 authors
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May 15, 2025

Communicative Agents for Software Development

Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 15, 2023 1

RPG: A Repository Planning Graph for Unified and Scalable Codebase Generation

Large language models excel at function- and file-level code generation, yet generating complete repositories from scratch remains a fundamental challenge. This process demands coherent and reliable planning across proposal- and implementation-level stages, while natural language, due to its ambiguity and verbosity, is ill-suited for faithfully representing complex software structures. To address this, we introduce the Repository Planning Graph (RPG), a persistent representation that unifies proposal- and implementation-level planning by encoding capabilities, file structures, data flows, and functions in one graph. RPG replaces ambiguous natural language with an explicit blueprint, enabling long-horizon planning and scalable repository generation. Building on RPG, we develop ZeroRepo, a graph-driven framework for repository generation from scratch. It operates in three stages: proposal-level planning and implementation-level refinement to construct the graph, followed by graph-guided code generation with test validation. To evaluate this setting, we construct RepoCraft, a benchmark of six real-world projects with 1,052 tasks. On RepoCraft, ZeroRepo produces repositories averaging nearly 36K LOC, roughly 3.9times the strongest baseline (Claude Code) and about 64times other baselines. It attains 81.5% functional coverage and a 69.7% pass rate, exceeding Claude Code by 27.3 and 35.8 percentage points, respectively. Further analysis shows that RPG models complex dependencies, enables progressively more sophisticated planning through near-linear scaling, and enhances LLM understanding of repositories, thereby accelerating agent localization.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 19, 2025 21

Divide-and-Conquer Meets Consensus: Unleashing the Power of Functions in Code Generation

Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2024

LLM Guided Evolution -- The Automation of Models Advancing Models

In the realm of machine learning, traditional model development and automated approaches like AutoML typically rely on layers of abstraction, such as tree-based or Cartesian genetic programming. Our study introduces "Guided Evolution" (GE), a novel framework that diverges from these methods by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly modify code. GE leverages LLMs for a more intelligent, supervised evolutionary process, guiding mutations and crossovers. Our unique "Evolution of Thought" (EoT) technique further enhances GE by enabling LLMs to reflect on and learn from the outcomes of previous mutations. This results in a self-sustaining feedback loop that augments decision-making in model evolution. GE maintains genetic diversity, crucial for evolutionary algorithms, by leveraging LLMs' capability to generate diverse responses from expertly crafted prompts and modulate model temperature. This not only accelerates the evolution process but also injects expert like creativity and insight into the process. Our application of GE in evolving the ExquisiteNetV2 model demonstrates its efficacy: the LLM-driven GE autonomously produced variants with improved accuracy, increasing from 92.52% to 93.34%, without compromising model compactness. This underscores the potential of LLMs to accelerate the traditional model design pipeline, enabling models to autonomously evolve and enhance their own designs.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 17, 2024

You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents

Autonomous user interface (UI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-UI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique -- leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans -- to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-UI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-UI.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 20, 2023

AutoMLGen: Navigating Fine-Grained Optimization for Coding Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in general programming tasks. However, in Machine Learning Engineering (MLE) scenarios such as AutoML and Kaggle competitions, achieving high performance depends heavily on expert intervention and repeated adjustments rather than simply generating correct code. When applied directly to these tasks, LLMs often lack fine-grained domain priors, and existing MLE approaches that use linear or tree-structured searches limit knowledge transfer to adjacent hierarchical links. As a result, they cannot leverage past full trajectories or share information across branches, limiting self-evolving ability and search space diversity. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoMLGen, an LLM-based coding agent that integrates a domain knowledge base for high-quality prior guidance and Monte Carlo Graph Search (MCGS) for efficient exploration. MCGS retains the tree-guided exploration of MCTS while embedding a graph structure into the expansion stage to enable dynamic path reorganization, historical trajectory reuse, and multi-solution fusion to support both self-evolution and collaborative learning. Combined with fine-grained operator sets, this design improves stability and accelerates convergence. Evaluation on the MLE-Bench shows that AutoMLGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in numerous dimensions, such as the average medal rate and the valid submission rate, under a 12-hour budget (half the standard runtime). The code is available at https://github.com/Alpha-Innovator/InternAgent.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 9, 2025

CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Program synthesis or code generation aims to generate a program that satisfies a problem specification. Recent approaches using large-scale pretrained language models (LMs) have shown promising results, yet they have some critical limitations. In particular, they often follow a standard supervised fine-tuning procedure to train a code generation model only from the pairs of natural-language problem descriptions and ground-truth programs. Such paradigm largely ignores some important but potentially useful signals in the problem specification such as unit tests, which thus often results in poor performance when solving complex unseen coding tasks. To address the limitations, we propose "CodeRL", a new framework for program synthesis tasks through pretrained LMs and deep reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, during training, we treat the code-generating LM as an actor network, and introduce a critic network that is trained to predict the functional correctness of generated programs and provide dense feedback signals to the actor. During inference, we introduce a new generation procedure with a critical sampling strategy that allows a model to automatically regenerate programs based on feedback from example unit tests and critic scores. For the model backbones, we extended the encoder-decoder architecture of CodeT5 with enhanced learning objectives, larger model sizes, and better pretraining data. Our method not only achieves new SOTA results on the challenging APPS benchmark, but also shows strong zero-shot transfer capability with new SOTA results on the simpler MBPP benchmark.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2022

EnvX: Agentize Everything with Agentic AI

The widespread availability of open-source repositories has led to a vast collection of reusable software components, yet their utilization remains manual, error-prone, and disconnected. Developers must navigate documentation, understand APIs, and write integration code, creating significant barriers to efficient software reuse. To address this, we present EnvX, a framework that leverages Agentic AI to agentize GitHub repositories, transforming them into intelligent, autonomous agents capable of natural language interaction and inter-agent collaboration. Unlike existing approaches that treat repositories as static code resources, EnvX reimagines them as active agents through a three-phase process: (1) TODO-guided environment initialization, which sets up the necessary dependencies, data, and validation datasets; (2) human-aligned agentic automation, allowing repository-specific agents to autonomously perform real-world tasks; and (3) Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, enabling multiple agents to collaborate. By combining large language model capabilities with structured tool integration, EnvX automates not just code generation, but the entire process of understanding, initializing, and operationalizing repository functionality. We evaluate EnvX on the GitTaskBench benchmark, using 18 repositories across domains such as image processing, speech recognition, document analysis, and video manipulation. Our results show that EnvX achieves a 74.07% execution completion rate and 51.85% task pass rate, outperforming existing frameworks. Case studies further demonstrate EnvX's ability to enable multi-repository collaboration via the A2A protocol. This work marks a shift from treating repositories as passive code resources to intelligent, interactive agents, fostering greater accessibility and collaboration within the open-source ecosystem.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 9, 2025 2

If LLM Is the Wizard, Then Code Is the Wand: A Survey on How Code Empowers Large Language Models to Serve as Intelligent Agents

The prominent large language models (LLMs) of today differ from past language models not only in size, but also in the fact that they are trained on a combination of natural language and formal language (code). As a medium between humans and computers, code translates high-level goals into executable steps, featuring standard syntax, logical consistency, abstraction, and modularity. In this survey, we present an overview of the various benefits of integrating code into LLMs' training data. Specifically, beyond enhancing LLMs in code generation, we observe that these unique properties of code help (i) unlock the reasoning ability of LLMs, enabling their applications to a range of more complex natural language tasks; (ii) steer LLMs to produce structured and precise intermediate steps, which can then be connected to external execution ends through function calls; and (iii) take advantage of code compilation and execution environment, which also provides diverse feedback for model improvement. In addition, we trace how these profound capabilities of LLMs, brought by code, have led to their emergence as intelligent agents (IAs) in situations where the ability to understand instructions, decompose goals, plan and execute actions, and refine from feedback are crucial to their success on downstream tasks. Finally, we present several key challenges and future directions of empowering LLMs with code.

  • 12 authors
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Jan 1, 2024 1

Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis

For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

Bridging Code Semantic and LLMs: Semantic Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable prowess in code generation. However, automated code generation is still challenging since it requires a high-level semantic mapping between natural language requirements and codes. Most existing LLMs-based approaches for code generation rely on decoder-only causal language models often treate codes merely as plain text tokens, i.e., feeding the requirements as a prompt input, and outputing code as flat sequence of tokens, potentially missing the rich semantic features inherent in source code. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the "Semantic Chain-of-Thought" approach to intruduce semantic information of code, named SeCoT. Our motivation is that the semantic information of the source code (\eg data flow and control flow) describes more precise program execution behavior, intention and function. By guiding LLM consider and integrate semantic information, we can achieve a more granular understanding and representation of code, enhancing code generation accuracy. Meanwhile, while traditional techniques leveraging such semantic information require complex static or dynamic code analysis to obtain features such as data flow and control flow, SeCoT demonstrates that this process can be fully automated via the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs (i.e., in-context learning), while being generalizable and applicable to challenging domains. While SeCoT can be applied with different LLMs, this paper focuses on the powerful GPT-style models: ChatGPT(close-source model) and WizardCoder(open-source model). The experimental study on three popular DL benchmarks (i.e., HumanEval, HumanEval-ET and MBPP) shows that SeCoT can achieves state-of-the-art performance, greatly improving the potential for large models and code generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

From Words to Collisions: LLM-Guided Evaluation and Adversarial Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios

Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles requires virtual scenario-based testing, which depends on the robust evaluation and generation of safety-critical scenarios. So far, researchers have used scenario-based testing frameworks that rely heavily on handcrafted scenarios as safety metrics. To reduce the effort of human interpretation and overcome the limited scalability of these approaches, we combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured scenario parsing and prompt engineering to automatically evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios. We introduce Cartesian and Ego-centric prompt strategies for scenario evaluation, and an adversarial generation module that modifies trajectories of risk-inducing vehicles (ego-attackers) to create critical scenarios. We validate our approach using a 2D simulation framework and multiple pre-trained LLMs. The results show that the evaluation module effectively detects collision scenarios and infers scenario safety. Meanwhile, the new generation module identifies high-risk agents and synthesizes realistic, safety-critical scenarios. We conclude that an LLM equipped with domain-informed prompting techniques can effectively evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios, reducing dependence on handcrafted metrics. We release our open-source code and scenarios at: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/From-Words-to-Collisions.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025 1

CoderEval: A Benchmark of Pragmatic Code Generation with Generative Pre-trained Models

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

  • 10 authors
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Feb 1, 2023

AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent System

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to significantly enhance human productivity by reasoning, using tools, and executing complex tasks in diverse environments. However, current approaches to developing such agents remain costly and inefficient, as they typically require manually constructed task datasets and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines with extensive random exploration. These limitations lead to prohibitively high data-construction costs, low exploration efficiency, and poor sample utilization. To address these challenges, we present AgentEvolver, a self-evolving agent system that leverages the semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to drive autonomous agent learning. AgentEvolver introduces three synergistic mechanisms: (i) self-questioning, which enables curiosity-driven task generation in novel environments, reducing dependence on handcrafted datasets; (ii) self-navigating, which improves exploration efficiency through experience reuse and hybrid policy guidance; and (iii) self-attributing, which enhances sample efficiency by assigning differentiated rewards to trajectory states and actions based on their contribution. By integrating these mechanisms into a unified framework, AgentEvolver enables scalable, cost-effective, and continual improvement of agent capabilities. Preliminary experiments indicate that AgentEvolver achieves more efficient exploration, better sample utilization, and faster adaptation compared to traditional RL-based baselines.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 13, 2025

Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Coding Agents

Agentic coding tools, such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, are transforming the software engineering landscape. These AI-powered systems function as autonomous teammates capable of planning and executing complex development tasks. Agents have become active participants in refactoring, a cornerstone of sustainable software development aimed at improving internal code quality without altering observable behavior. Despite their increasing adoption, there is a critical lack of empirical understanding regarding how agentic refactoring is utilized in practice, how it compares to human-driven refactoring, and what impact it has on code quality. To address this empirical gap, we present a large-scale study of AI agent-generated refactorings in real-world open-source Java projects, analyzing 15,451 refactoring instances across 12,256 pull requests and 14,988 commits derived from the AIDev dataset. Our empirical analysis shows that refactoring is a common and intentional activity in this development paradigm, with agents explicitly targeting refactoring in 26.1% of commits. Analysis of refactoring types reveals that agentic efforts are dominated by low-level, consistency-oriented edits, such as Change Variable Type (11.8%), Rename Parameter (10.4%), and Rename Variable (8.5%), reflecting a preference for localized improvements over the high-level design changes common in human refactoring. Additionally, the motivations behind agentic refactoring focus overwhelmingly on internal quality concerns, with maintainability (52.5%) and readability (28.1%). Furthermore, quantitative evaluation of code quality metrics shows that agentic refactoring yields small but statistically significant improvements in structural metrics, particularly for medium-level changes, reducing class size and complexity (e.g., Class LOC median Δ = -15.25).

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025 2

ANPL: Towards Natural Programming with Interactive Decomposition

Though LLMs are capable of generating plausible programs, it's challenging to interact with the LLMs further to revise the program, especially if the user's specific requirements are different from the initial proposal. In this paper, we introduce ANPL, an interactive programming system that ensures users can always refine the generated code towards their specific programmatic intents via structured decompositions. Borrowing the paradigm of sketching from program synthesis, an ANPL program consists of a set of input-outputs that it must satisfy, a ``sketch'' -- control/data flow expressed in precise code (e.g. Python), and ``holes'' -- sub-modules to be implemented by the LLM specified with natural language. The user revises an ANPL program by either modifying the sketch, changing the language used to describe the holes, or providing additional input-outputs to a particular hole, turning it into a sub-ANPL program that can be solved recursively. This workflow allows the users to offload programming burdens to the LLM as much as possible while retaining the ability to pinpoint and resolve bugs locally, without exposing the rest of the program to the LLM. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. Additional evaluations on APPS, HumanEval, and real-world programming tasks have validated that the ANPL framework is applicable to multiple programming domains. We release the ANPL solutions to the ARC tasks as a dataset, providing insights into how humans decompose novel tasks programmatically. See our code at https://iprc-dip.github.io/ANPL/.

  • 11 authors
·
May 29, 2023

ToolChain*: Efficient Action Space Navigation in Large Language Models with A* Search

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful decision-making and planning capabilities in solving complicated real-world problems. LLM-based autonomous agents can interact with diverse tools (e.g., functional APIs) and generate solution plans that execute a series of API function calls in a step-by-step manner. The multitude of candidate API function calls significantly expands the action space, amplifying the critical need for efficient action space navigation. However, existing methods either struggle with unidirectional exploration in expansive action spaces, trapped into a locally optimal solution, or suffer from exhaustively traversing all potential actions, causing inefficient navigation. To address these issues, we propose ToolChain*, an efficient tree search-based planning algorithm for LLM-based agents. It formulates the entire action space as a decision tree, where each node represents a possible API function call involved in a solution plan. By incorporating the A* search algorithm with task-specific cost function design, it efficiently prunes high-cost branches that may involve incorrect actions, identifying the most low-cost valid path as the solution. Extensive experiments on multiple tool-use and reasoning tasks demonstrate that ToolChain* efficiently balances exploration and exploitation within an expansive action space. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on planning and reasoning tasks by 3.1% and 3.5% on average while requiring 7.35x and 2.31x less time, respectively.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023 1

KAT-Coder Technical Report

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled progress in agentic coding, where models autonomously reason, plan, and act within interactive software development workflows. However, bridging the gap between static text-based training and dynamic real-world agentic execution remains a core challenge. In this technical report, we present KAT-Coder, a large-scale agentic code model trained through a multi-stage curriculum encompassing Mid-Term Training, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT), and Reinforcement-to-Deployment Adaptation. The Mid-Term stage enhances reasoning, planning, and reflection capabilities through a corpus of real software engineering data and synthetic agentic interactions. The SFT stage constructs a million-sample dataset balancing twenty programming languages, ten development contexts, and ten task archetypes. The RFT stage introduces a novel multi-ground-truth reward formulation for stable and sample-efficient policy optimization. Finally, the Reinforcement-to-Deployment phase adapts the model to production-grade IDE environments using Error-Masked SFT and Tree-Structured Trajectory Training. In summary, these stages enable KAT-Coder to achieve robust tool-use reliability, instruction alignment, and long-context reasoning, forming a deployable foundation for real-world intelligent coding agents. Our KAT series 32B model, KAT-Dev, has been open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/Kwaipilot/KAT-Dev.

  • 40 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

Lita: Light Agent Uncovers the Agentic Coding Capabilities of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to programming tasks, ranging from single-turn code completion to autonomous agents. Current code agent designs frequently depend on complex, hand-crafted workflows and tool sets. However, this reliance on elaborate scaffolding presents several challenges: agent performance becomes overly dependent on prompt tuning and custom design choices, heavy human intervention obscures a model's true underlying capabilities, and intricate pipelines are costly to build and maintain. Furthermore, optimizing complex task prompts increases the risk of data leakage. Currently, when introducing new models, LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic often publish benchmark scores to demonstrate their models' coding proficiency, but keep their proprietary evaluation frameworks confidential. To address these limitations, we introduce Lita (Lite Agent), which operationalizes liteness, a principle of minimizing manual design while retaining the essential elements of a fully autonomous agent. Lita enables a more faithful and unified evaluation without elaborate scaffolding. Experiments on the Aider Polyglot and SWE-Bench with frontier models demonstrate that Lita achieves competitive or superior performance compared to workflow-based and agentic baselines. Crucially, Lita also consumes fewer tokens and requires significantly less design effort. Our results suggest that Lita is sufficient to reveal the underlying coding competence of modern LLMs. Finally, we propose the Agent Complexity Law: the performance gap between agents of varying complexity, from simple to sophisticated designs, will shrink as the core model improves, ultimately converging to a negligible difference.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025

Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

  • 5 authors
·
May 29, 2024

Agents4PLC: Automating Closed-loop PLC Code Generation and Verification in Industrial Control Systems using LLM-based Agents

In industrial control systems, the generation and verification of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) code are critical for ensuring operational efficiency and safety. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made strides in automated code generation, they often fall short in providing correctness guarantees and specialized support for PLC programming. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Agents4PLC, a novel framework that not only automates PLC code generation but also includes code-level verification through an LLM-based multi-agent system. We first establish a comprehensive benchmark for verifiable PLC code generation area, transitioning from natural language requirements to human-written-verified formal specifications and reference PLC code. We further enhance our `agents' specifically for industrial control systems by incorporating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), advanced prompt engineering techniques, and Chain-of-Thought strategies. Evaluation against the benchmark demonstrates that Agents4PLC significantly outperforms previous methods, achieving superior results across a series of increasingly rigorous metrics. This research not only addresses the critical challenges in PLC programming but also highlights the potential of our framework to generate verifiable code applicable to real-world industrial applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024