Daily Papers

Coding agents can generate web applications from natural-language descriptions, yet a recent benchmark study shows that generated applications fail to meet functional requirements in over 70% of cases. The core difficulty is that web correctness cannot be assessed from source files or terminal output: the application must be deployed, exercised through simulated browser interactions, and failures must be translated into actionable repair signals -- steps that current agents cannot perform without human mediation. We present TDDev, a framework that automates this closed loop through three stages: (1) converting high-level requirements into structured acceptance tests before any code is written, (2) deploying the application and validating it through browser-based interaction simulation, and (3) translating browser-observed failures into structured repair reports for the coding agent. Enabled by TDDev, we conduct the first controlled empirical study of Test-driven development (TDD) strategies for web application generation, comparing four development protocols across two coding agents, two backbone models, and two benchmarks. TDD infrastructure consistently improves generation quality by 34--48 percentage points over a no-TDD baseline. The central finding is that the optimal protocol depends on the model's generation style: models that build applications holistically benefit most from agentic enforcement, while models that extend code conservatively benefit from incremental enforcement. Mismatching protocol to generation style eliminates the TDD benefit entirely while multiplying token cost up to 25-fold. A user study confirms that TDDev reduces manual developer intervention to zero, shifting the workload from continuous prompt engineering to autonomous, feedback-driven refinement.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for Automated Program Repair (APR), yet most existing approaches remain unimodal and fail to leverage the rich diagnostic signals contained in visual artifacts such as screenshots and control-flow graphs. In practice, many bug reports convey critical information visually (e.g., layout breakage or missing widgets), but directly using such dense visual inputs often causes context loss and noise, making it difficult for MLLMs to ground visual observations into precise fault localization and executable patches. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose SVRepair, a multimodal APR framework with structured visual representation. SVRepair first fine-tunes a vision-language model, Structured Visual Representation (SVR), to uniformly transform heterogeneous visual artifacts into a semantic scene graph that captures GUI elements and their structural relations (e.g., hierarchy), providing normalized, code-relevant context for downstream repair. Building on the graph, SVRepair drives a coding agent to localize faults and synthesize patches, and further introduces an iterative visual-artifact segmentation strategy that progressively narrows the input to bug-centered regions to suppress irrelevant context and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: SVRepair achieves 36.47\% accuracy on SWE-Bench M, 38.02\% on MMCode, and 95.12\% on CodeVision, validating the effectiveness of SVRepair for multimodal program repair.

Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

Existing Open-Ended Deep Research (OEDR) systems primarily generate reports from scratch, making them inefficient for scenarios where research reports need to be continuously maintained as new information emerges. We introduce Incremental Open-Ended Deep Research (Incremental-OEDR), a research setting that treats a report as an evolving research state and incrementally updates it by preserving valid knowledge, revising outdated or incomplete content, and incorporating newly available information. To support this setting, we propose Structured Harness, which represents reports as structured collections of outlines, sections, and supporting evidence, and provides structured retrieval, a persistent structured evidence pool, and structured generation for selective report updating and evidence reuse. We further establish a temporal evaluation framework spanning ten years, with Single-Step Task and Long-Chain Task to evaluate incremental updates over both individual transitions and long-term update chains. Extensive Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepConsult under both the Open-source Configuration (OC) and Proprietary Configuration (PC) show that Incremental-OEDR maintains competitive report quality while substantially improving report continuity and reducing research costs. As shown in Figure~fig:profile, it achieves up to 0.51 higher content-level ROUGE-L F1, 0.63 higher outline-level EM F1, 33\% lower token consumption, and 61\% fewer search calls than OEDR on DeepResearch Bench. For more details, please refer to our project page: https://ioedr-project.github.io/.

The exercise of detecting similar bug reports in bug tracking systems is known as duplicate bug report detection. Having prior knowledge of a bug report's existence reduces efforts put into debugging problems and identifying the root cause. Rule and Query-based solutions recommend a long list of potential similar bug reports with no clear ranking. In addition, triage engineers are less motivated to spend time going through an extensive list. Consequently, this deters the use of duplicate bug report retrieval solutions. In this paper, we have proposed a solution using a combination of NLP techniques. Our approach considers unstructured and structured attributes of a bug report like summary, description and severity, impacted products, platforms, categories, etc. It uses a custom data transformer, a deep neural network, and a non-generalizing machine learning method to retrieve existing identical bug reports. We have performed numerous experiments with significant data sources containing thousands of bug reports and showcased that the proposed solution achieves a high retrieval accuracy of 70% for recall@5.

Automated program repair (APR) agents are transitioning from research benchmarks to developer workflows, yet they still begin with bug reports written for human developers. While decades of research have established what makes a good bug report for humans (e.g., steps to reproduce, stack traces), it remains unclear whether these features transfer to LLM-based agents. We study this question in two analyses. First, we use statistical modeling to examine associations between 27 bug-report features and repair success across 433 SWE-bench Verified issues attempted by 87 repair agents. We find that fix suggestions, reproduction scripts, repository source code, and localization info are associated with higher resolution likelihood, while longer reports are associated with lower odds. Second, we conduct controlled ablations across 2 models and 17 problem-statement mutations on SWE-bench Pro, varying the information available to an agent while holding the underlying task fixed. We remove or isolate selected bug-report content, delete fault-localization cues, and test structural changes that flatten lists or remove section headers. We find that both models depend on localization cues and expected behavior, and that structural changes alone can reduce solve rates, even without removing any content. The two models diverge in how they handle missing information: Qwen searches more widely and can exhaust its turn budget, while Gemma commits to a plausible interpretation early and patches on it. Our findings indicate that a good bug report for an agent overlaps with, but is not identical to, a good report for a human: agents benefit most from concrete, executable, and well-localized information, whereas some qualities long emphasized for human readers, such as natural language steps to reproduce and readable descriptions, contribute little or even correlate with lower success.

Bug reports serve as task specifications for repository-level automated program repair (APR) agents, but they often describe only the observed failure and omit repair-relevant information such as the failure-inducing behavior, behavioral requirement, and implementation scope. As a result, a repair agent may inspect irrelevant code, infer an incorrect requirement, or generate a patch that addresses the reported symptom without restoring the intended repository behavior. We present TrajSpec, a trajectory-guided approach for repository-supported bug report specification refinement. Given an original report and a pre-fix repository, TrajSpec runs a trajectory-collection agent and uses the resulting unverified trajectory as a source of trajectory-derived specification evidence. It organizes this evidence into a three-level representation consisting of a high-level interpretation of the issue, diagnostic findings supporting that interpretation, and concrete repository observations. TrajSpec then generates a draft refined report and applies repository-based review to remove unsupported claims, revise uncertain claims, and add repository-supported details. We evaluate TrajSpec on all 300 SWE-Bench Lite instances using Mini-SWE-Agent V2. TrajSpec's refined reports improve Pass@1 from 41.00% to 59.67% with GPT-5-mini and from 54.67% to 64.33% with MiniMax M2.5. On a stratified sample of 100 instances, TrajSpec's refined reports also improve Pass@1 from 41.00% to 71.00% with Agentless and from 47.00% to 72.00% with AutoCodeRover. Ablation results show that removing repository-based review or the hierarchical evidence representation reduces Pass@1 from 59.67% to 48.00% and 47.67%, respectively. Overall, TrajSpec provides actionable repository-supported context that consistently improves repair performance.

Bug reports contain the information developers need to triage and fix software bugs. However, unclear, incomplete, or ambiguous information may lead to delays and excessive manual effort spent on bug triage and resolution. In this paper, we explore whether Instruction fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically transform casual, unstructured bug reports into high-quality, structured bug reports adhering to a standard template. We evaluate three open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (Qwen 2.5, Mistral, and Llama 3.2) against ChatGPT-4o, measuring performance on established metrics such as CTQRS, ROUGE, METEOR, and SBERT. Our experiments show that fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 achieves a CTQRS score of 77%, outperforming both fine-tuned Mistral (71%), Llama 3.2 (63%) and ChatGPT in 3-shot learning (75%). Further analysis reveals that Llama 3.2 shows higher accuracy of detecting missing fields particularly Expected Behavior and Actual Behavior, while Qwen 2.5 demonstrates superior performance in capturing Steps-to-Reproduce, with an F1 score of 76%. Additional testing of the models on other popular projects (e.g., Eclipse, GCC) demonstrates that our approach generalizes well, achieving up to 70% CTQRS in unseen projects' bug reports. These findings highlight the potential of instruction fine-tuning in automating structured bug report generation, reducing manual effort for developers and streamlining the software maintenance process.

Industrial technical reports contain high-value knowledge for maintenance, troubleshooting, and product engineering, but their heterogeneous structure (dense prose, specifications, tables) makes them difficult to index and reason over with standard retrieval and QA pipelines, and no public instruction-tuning or benchmark datasets are built from such documents. We address this gap with Industrial-Instruction, contributing (i) two open QA datasets built from real industrial technical reports and (ii) the end-to-end pipeline that produces them. Using 906 public Panasonic documents (7,525 pages), we apply layout-aware extraction, build a semantic retrieval index, and synthesize multiple-choice QA grounded in retrieved evidence under five query-document relationships (irrelevant retrieval, single-/multi-document support, single-/multi-document answer). After filtering an initial 23.9k generated samples, each dataset provides approximately 13.6k QA pairs with source documents and a held-out benchmark split. Fine-tuning small open LLMs (under 10B parameters) improves Set-Match Accuracy from 28.5% to 42.0% and F1 from 46.6% to 63.5% on the Panasonic benchmark. We release two parallel versions built by the same pipeline: one generated with the open-weight Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct model and one with the closed, API-based Claude-Opus-4.6 model, enabling a direct comparison of open- versus frontier-model data generation. The Claude-Opus-4.6 dataset yields a cleaner raw corpus and larger fine-tuning gains, at roughly two orders of magnitude higher cost. MMLU evaluation shows models trained on the Claude-Opus-4.6 data retain essentially all general knowledge, versus a small but measurable forgetting effect for the Qwen-generated data. Together, these datasets and pipeline offer a practical, reproducible path toward scalable industrial benchmarks and training data from real-world documentation.

Bug bounty platforms (e.g., HackerOne, BugCrowd) leverage crowd-sourced vulnerability discovery to improve continuous coverage, reduce the cost of discovery, and serve as an integral complement to internal red teams. With the rise of AI-generated bug reports, little work exists to help bug hunters understand why these reports are labeled as invalid. To improve report quality and reduce reviewers' burden, it is critical to predict invalid reports and interpret invalid reasons. In this work, we conduct an empirical study with the purpose of helping bug hunters understand the validity of reports. We collect a dataset of 9,942 disclosed bug bounty reports, including 1,400 invalid reports, and evaluate whether state-of-the-art large language models can identify invalid reports. While models such as GPT-5, DeepSeek, and a fine-tuned RoBERTa achieve strong overall accuracy, they consistently struggle to detect invalid cases, showing a tendency to over-accept reports. To improve invalidity detection, we build a taxonomy of rejection reasons for Information Disclosure vulnerabilities and incorporate it into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework. This approach substantially improves classification consistency and reduces bias. We also examine whether reviewer decisions may be influenced by factors beyond the content of the report. Our analysis shows that reporters with higher reputations tend to receive more favorable outcomes in borderline cases, suggesting that perceived expertise can influence review judgments. Overall, our findings highlight the challenges of invalid report identification and show that combining LLMs with structured reviewer knowledge can support more transparent and consistent vulnerability report review.

Program repair techniques offer cost-saving benefits for debugging within software development and programming education scenarios. With the proven effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code-related tasks, researchers have explored their potential for program repair. However, it is crucial to recognize that existing repair benchmarks may have influenced LLM training data, potentially causing data leakage. To evaluate LLMs' realistic repair capabilities, (1) we introduce an extensive, non-crawled benchmark, referred to as TutorCode, comprising 1,239 C++ defect codes and associated information such as tutor guidance, solution description, failing test cases, and the corrected code. Our work assesses the repair performance of 12 LLMs on TutorCode, measuring repair correctness (TOP-5 and AVG-5) and patch precision (RPSR). (2) We then provide a comprehensive investigation into which types of extra information can help LLMs improve their performance in repairing defects. Among these types, tutor guidance was found to be the most effective information in enhancing LLM repair capabilities. To fully harness LLMs' conversational capabilities and the benefits of augmented information, (3) we introduce a novel conversational semi-automatic repair framework CREF assisting human tutor. It demonstrates a remarkable AVG-5 improvement of 17.2%-24.6% compared to the baseline, achieving an impressive AVG-5 of 76.6% when utilizing GPT-4. These results highlight the potential for enhancing LLMs' repair capabilities through interactions with tutors and historical conversations involving incorrect responses. The successful application of CREF in a real-world educational setting demonstrates its effectiveness in reducing tutors' workload and improving students' learning experience, while also showcasing its promise for facilitating other software engineering tasks, such as code review.

LLM-based Lean proving systems increasingly organize a proof as a blueprint: a dependency graph of formal statements. We introduce BlueprintRepair, a repair interface that lets a model change this graph through ten schema-checked local operations. An operation names the node it edits, so the target theorem cannot be changed. Lean checks every applied change, and an accepted repair must declare every blueprint lemma its proof uses. We also construct BlueprintTrace, a benchmark of 142 controlled failures with complete accepted and rejected repair trajectories. We compare typed edits, exact source patches, and complete module rewrites under matched source, feedback, model, and budget, one episode per state and interface. With DeepSeek-V4-Flash, the three interfaces solve almost the same number of the benchmark's localized failures. Typed repair is the cheapest per solved state (patching is 1.30x as expensive, rewriting 2.06x), and within 10,000 completion tokens per task it reaches almost all of its final coverage, while both free-form interfaces are well behind. A second model, Qwen3.6-Flash, solves fewer states but keeps typed repair cheapest, puts it ahead on the proof-authoring states, and repeats the localized pattern.

Bug reports are an essential aspect of software development, and it is crucial to identify and resolve them quickly to ensure the consistent functioning of software systems. Retrieving similar bug reports from an existing database can help reduce the time and effort required to resolve bugs. In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of semantic textual similarity methods for retrieving similar bug reports based on a similarity score. We explored several embedding models such as TF-IDF (Baseline), FastText, Gensim, BERT, and ADA. We used the Software Defects Data containing bug reports for various software projects to evaluate the performance of these models. Our experimental results showed that BERT generally outperformed the rest of the models regarding recall, followed by ADA, Gensim, FastText, and TFIDF. Our study provides insights into the effectiveness of different embedding methods for retrieving similar bug reports and highlights the impact of selecting the appropriate one for this task. Our code is available on GitHub.

Large language model agents increasingly store reusable procedures outside the model. These reusable procedures are often called skills: they may be code functions, natural-language instructions, SKILL.md packages, workflow graphs, or learned adapters that a future agent can retrieve and invoke. This taxonomy-driven survey asks how such skill libraries change over time. Across a 124-paper 2023--2026 audit set, we synthesize dynamic skill systems as lifecycle-managed, verified, evolving artifact stores: agents collect evidence from interaction, propose skill updates, verify and admit candidates, organize them for retrieval and composition, repair or prune stale entries, and govern sharing through provenance and rollback. We organize the literature around three survey tools. First, a six-sense taxonomy distinguishes the structurally different artifacts called ``skills'' in current papers. Second, an eight-stage lifecycle architecture identifies the recurring design decisions behind evidence acquisition, proposal, verification/admission, storage, retrieval/composition, maintenance, distillation/portability, and governance. Third, a lightweight skill-record schema and ten-operator vocabulary provide common terms for comparing library updates without elevating them into a separate method contribution. Using this structure, we synthesize evidence-graded patterns with explicit caveats: admission and repair are repeatedly important, verifier quality materially affects skill-aware RL, flat retrieval can degrade as libraries grow, and current benchmarks still under-report library trajectories, usage--utility gaps, and safety surfaces. We close with concrete reporting standards and open problems for evaluating dynamic skills as changing libraries rather than static prompt or tool collections.

Engineering diagrams pose a distinct challenge for vision-language models: unlike natural images or general documents, they encode information through dense spatial layouts, domain-specific symbols, and cross-references between visual callouts and structured parts tables. Despite their centrality to service, repair, and design workflows, there is no public benchmark for measuring VLM capabilities in this domain; existing datasets primarily focus on flowcharts, scientific figures, or business documents. To address this gap, we introduce Enginuity, the first open dataset and benchmark for evaluating VLMs on complex engineering diagrams. We define two tasks over a corpus of U.S. military service and repair manuals: structured parts-table extraction (Task 1) and free-form visual diagram question answering (VQA)(Task 2) for benchmarking. We evaluate four frontier VLMs (GPT-5.2 Chat, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemma 4, Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct) under zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting. On Task 1, models reach Recall@all of 0.61-0.87 but Token F1pen of only 0.03-0.18, exposing a systematic gap between part identification and description fidelity. Task 2 reveals a consistent factual-reasoning gap across all models. A supporting analysis shows that token-overlap metrics under-report model capability on technical descriptions by 2-6x relative to semantic similarity, motivating LLM-as-judge calibration for domain-specific evaluation. We release the dataset, annotations, evaluation harness, and per-sample model outputs to support a reproducible study of VLM capability on engineering content.

Reliably transferring specialized human knowledge from text into large language models remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Fine-tuning on domain corpora has enabled substantial capability gains, but the process operates without feedback: when a model fails on a domain task, there is no method to diagnose what is deficient in the training data, and the only recourse is to add more data indiscriminately. Here we show that when a structured knowledge representation extracted from the source corpus serves as the shared foundation for both training data and evaluation, the complete data-engineering lifecycle maps onto the software development lifecycle in a precise and operative way: training data becomes source code specifying what the model should learn, model training becomes compilation, benchmarking becomes unit testing, and failure-driven data repair becomes debugging. Under this correspondence, model failures decompose into concept-level gaps and reasoning-chain breaks that can be traced back to specific deficiencies in the data and repaired through targeted patches, with each repair cycle producing consistent improvements across model scales and architectures without degrading general capabilities. We formalize this principle as Programming with Data and instantiate it across sixteen disciplines spanning the natural sciences, engineering, biomedicine, and the social sciences, releasing a structured knowledge base, benchmark suite, and training corpus as open resources. By demonstrating that the relationship between training data and model behaviour is structurally traceable and systematically repairable, this work establishes a principled foundation for the reliable engineering of human expertise into language models.

BACKGROUND: Radiology reports are typically written in a free-text format, making clinical information difficult to extract and use. Recently the adoption of structured reporting (SR) has been recommended by various medical societies thanks to the advantages it offers, e.g. standardization, completeness and information retrieval. We propose a pipeline to extract information from free-text radiology reports, that fits with the items of the reference SR registry proposed by a national society of interventional and medical radiology, focusing on CT staging of patients with lymphoma. METHODS: Our work aims to leverage the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer-based models to deal with automatic SR registry filling. With the availability of 174 radiology reports, we investigate a rule-free generative Question Answering approach based on a domain-specific version of T5 (IT5). Two strategies (batch-truncation and ex-post combination) are implemented to comply with the model's context length limitations. Performance is evaluated in terms of strict accuracy, F1, and format accuracy, and compared with the widely used GPT-3.5 Large Language Model. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire is used to collect human-expert feedback on the similarity between medical annotations and generated answers. RESULTS: The combination of fine-tuning and batch splitting allows IT5 to achieve notable results; it performs on par with GPT-3.5 albeit its size being a thousand times smaller in terms of parameters. Human-based assessment scores show a high correlation (Spearman's correlation coefficients>0.88, p-values<0.001) with AI performance metrics (F1) and confirm the superior ability of LLMs (i.e., GPT-3.5, 175B of parameters) in generating plausible human-like statements.

Automated radiology report generation from chest X-ray (CXR) images has the potential to improve clinical efficiency and reduce radiologists' workload. However, most datasets, including the publicly available MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert Plus, consist entirely of free-form reports, which are inherently variable and unstructured. This variability poses challenges for both generation and evaluation: existing models struggle to produce consistent, clinically meaningful reports, and standard evaluation metrics fail to capture the nuances of radiological interpretation. To address this, we introduce Structured Radiology Report Generation (SRRG), a new task that reformulates free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. We create a novel dataset by restructuring reports using large language models (LLMs) following strict structured reporting desiderata. Additionally, we introduce SRR-BERT, a fine-grained disease classification model trained on 55 labels, enabling more precise and clinically informed evaluation of structured reports. To assess report quality, we propose F1-SRR-BERT, a metric that leverages SRR-BERT's hierarchical disease taxonomy to bridge the gap between free-text variability and structured clinical reporting. We validate our dataset through a reader study conducted by five board-certified radiologists and extensive benchmarking experiments.

Automated Program Repair (APR) has evolved significantly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). Fine-tuning LLMs for program repair is a recent avenue of research, with many dimensions which have not been explored. Existing work mostly fine-tunes LLMs with naive code representations and is fundamentally limited in its ability to fine-tune larger LLMs. To address this problem, we propose RepairLLaMA, a novel program repair approach that combines 1) code representations for APR and 2) the state-of-the-art parameter-efficient LLM fine-tuning technique called LoRA. This results in RepairLLaMA producing a highly effective `program repair adapter' for fixing bugs with language models. Our experiments demonstrate the validity of both concepts. First, fine-tuning adapters with program repair specific code representations enables the model to use meaningful repair signals. Second, parameter-efficient fine-tuning helps fine-tuning to converge and contributes to the effectiveness of the repair adapter to fix data-points outside the fine-tuning data distribution. Overall, RepairLLaMA correctly fixes 125 Defects4J v2 and 82 HumanEval-Java bugs, outperforming all baselines.

Not a day goes by without hearing about the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), and equally, not a day passes without hearing about their challenges. LLMs are notoriously vulnerable to biases in their dataset, leading to issues such as toxicity. While domain-adaptive training has been employed to mitigate these issues, these techniques often address all model parameters indiscriminately during the repair process, resulting in poor repair quality and reduced model versatility. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic slicing-based intent-aware LLM repair strategy, IRepair. This approach selectively targets the most error-prone sections of the model for repair. Specifically, we propose dynamically slicing the model's most sensitive layers that require immediate attention, concentrating repair efforts on those areas. This method enables more effective repairs with potentially less impact on the model's overall performance by altering a smaller portion of the model. We evaluated our technique on three models from the GPT2 and GPT-Neo families, with parameters ranging from 800M to 1.6B, in a toxicity mitigation setup. Our results show that IRepair repairs errors 43.6% more effectively while causing 46% less disruption to general performance compared to the closest baseline, direct preference optimization. Our empirical analysis also reveals that errors are more concentrated in a smaller section of the model, with the top 20% of layers exhibiting 773% more error density than the remaining 80\%. This highlights the need for selective repair. Additionally, we demonstrate that a dynamic selection approach is essential for addressing errors dispersed throughout the model, ensuring a robust and efficient repair.

Issue-commit linking, which connects issues with commits that fix them, is crucial for software maintenance. Existing approaches have shown promise in automatically recovering these links. Evaluations of these techniques assess their ability to identify genuine links from plausible but false links. However, these evaluations overlook the fact that, in reality, when a repository has more commits, the presence of more plausible yet unrelated commits may interfere with the tool in differentiating the correct fix commits. To address this, we propose the Realistic Distribution Setting (RDS) and use it to construct a more realistic evaluation dataset that includes 20 open-source projects. By evaluating tools on this dataset, we observe that the performance of the state-of-the-art deep learning-based approach drops by more than half, while the traditional Information Retrieval method, VSM, outperforms it. Inspired by these observations, we propose EasyLink, which utilizes a vector database as a modern Information Retrieval technique. To address the long-standing problem of the semantic gap between issues and commits, EasyLink leverages a large language model to rerank the commits retrieved from the database. Under our evaluation, EasyLink achieves an average Precision@1 of 75.03\%, improving over the state-of-the-art by over four times. Additionally, this paper provides practical guidelines for advancing research in issue-commit link recovery.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program behavior and hindering precise error localization. In addition, without a way to learn from prior failures, repair processes often fall into repetitive and inefficient cycles. To overcome these challenges, we present TraceCoder, a collaborative multi-agent framework that emulates the observe-analyze-repair process of human experts. The framework first instruments the code with diagnostic probes to capture fine-grained runtime traces, enabling deep insight into its internal execution. It then conducts causal analysis on these traces to accurately identify the root cause of the failure. This process is further enhanced by a novel Historical Lesson Learning Mechanism (HLLM), which distills insights from prior failed repair attempts to inform subsequent correction strategies and prevent recurrence of similar mistakes. To ensure stable convergence, a Rollback Mechanism enforces that each repair iteration constitutes a strict improvement toward the correct solution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that TraceCoder achieves up to a 34.43\% relative improvement in Pass@1 accuracy over existing advanced baselines. Ablation studies verify the significance of each system component, with the iterative repair process alone contributing a 65.61\% relative gain in accuracy. Furthermore, TraceCoder significantly outperforms leading iterative methods in terms of both accuracy and cost-efficiency.

Recently, multiple Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to enhance the repair performance. While these techniques mainly focus on the single-line or hunk-level repair, they face significant challenges in real-world application due to the limited repair task scope and costly statement-level fault localization. However, the more practical function-level APR, which broadens the scope of APR task to fix entire buggy functions and requires only cost-efficient function-level fault localization, remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of LLM-based function-level APR including investigating the effect of the few-shot learning mechanism and the auxiliary repair-relevant information. Specifically, we adopt six widely-studied LLMs and construct a benchmark in both the Defects4J 1.2 and 2.0 datasets. Our study demonstrates that LLMs with zero-shot learning are already powerful function-level APR techniques, while applying the few-shot learning mechanism leads to disparate repair performance. Moreover, we find that directly applying the auxiliary repair-relevant information to LLMs significantly increases function-level repair performance. Inspired by our findings, we propose an LLM-based function-level APR technique, namely SRepair, which adopts a dual-LLM framework to leverage the power of the auxiliary repair-relevant information for advancing the repair performance. The evaluation results demonstrate that SRepair can correctly fix 300 single-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, largely surpassing all previous APR techniques by at least 85%, without the need for the costly statement-level fault location information. Furthermore, SRepair successfully fixes 32 multi-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, which is the first time achieved by any APR technique ever to our best knowledge.

Automatic program repair (APR) is crucial to reduce manual debugging efforts for developers and improve software reliability. While conventional search-based techniques typically rely on heuristic rules or a redundancy assumption to mine fix patterns, recent years have witnessed the surge of deep learning (DL) based approaches to automate the program repair process in a data-driven manner. However, their performance is often limited by a fixed set of parameters to model the highly complex search space of APR. To ease such burden on the parametric models, in this work, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation framework (RAP-Gen) by explicitly leveraging relevant fix patterns retrieved from a codebase of previous bug-fix pairs. Specifically, we build a hybrid patch retriever to account for both lexical and semantic matching based on the raw source code in a language-agnostic manner, which does not rely on any code-specific features. In addition, we adapt a code-aware language model CodeT5 as our foundation model to facilitate both patch retrieval and generation tasks in a unified manner. We adopt a stage-wise approach where the patch retriever first retrieves a relevant external bug-fix pair to augment the buggy input for the CodeT5 patch generator, which synthesizes a ranked list of repair patch candidates. Notably, RAP-Gen is a generic APR framework that can flexibly integrate different patch retrievers and generators to repair various types of bugs. We thoroughly evaluate RAP-Gen on three benchmarks in two programming languages, including the TFix benchmark in JavaScript, and Code Refinement and Defects4J benchmarks in Java, where the bug localization information may or may not be provided. Experimental results show that RAP-Gen significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on all benchmarks, e.g., repairing 15 more bugs on 818 Defects4J bugs.

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Table Question Answering (Table QA) in real-world settings must operate over both structured databases and semi-structured tables containing textual fields. However, existing benchmarks are tied to fixed data formats and have not systematically examined how representation itself affects model performance. We present the first controlled study that isolates the role of table representation by holding content constant while varying structure. Using a verbalization pipeline, we generate paired structured and semi-structured tables, enabling direct comparisons across modeling paradigms. To support detailed analysis, we introduce RePairTQA, a diagnostic benchmark with splits along table size, join requirements, query complexity, and schema quality. Our experiments reveal consistent trade-offs: SQL-based methods achieve high accuracy on structured inputs but degrade on semi-structured data, LLMs exhibit flexibility but reduced precision, and hybrid approaches strike a balance, particularly under noisy schemas. These effects intensify with larger tables and more complex queries. Ultimately, no single method excels across all conditions, and we highlight the central role of representation in shaping Table QA performance. Our findings provide actionable insights for model selection and design, paving the way for more robust hybrid approaches suited for diverse real-world data formats.

AI-driven program repair uses AI models to repair buggy software by producing patches. Rapid advancements in AI surely impact state-of-the-art performance of program repair. Yet, grasping this progress requires frequent and standardized evaluations. We propose RepairBench, a novel leaderboard for AI-driven program repair. The key characteristics of RepairBench are: 1) it is execution-based: all patches are compiled and executed against a test suite, 2) it assesses frontier models in a frequent and standardized way. RepairBench leverages two high-quality benchmarks, Defects4J and GitBug-Java, to evaluate frontier models against real-world program repair tasks. We publicly release the evaluation framework of RepairBench. We will update the leaderboard as new frontier models are released.

Bug reports are vital for software maintenance that allow users to inform developers of the problems encountered while using the software. As such, researchers have committed considerable resources toward automating bug replay to expedite the process of software maintenance. Nonetheless, the success of current automated approaches is largely dictated by the characteristics and quality of bug reports, as they are constrained by the limitations of manually-crafted patterns and pre-defined vocabulary lists. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language understanding, we propose AdbGPT, a new lightweight approach to automatically reproduce the bugs from bug reports through prompt engineering, without any training and hard-coding effort. AdbGPT leverages few-shot learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to elicit human knowledge and logical reasoning from LLMs to accomplish the bug replay in a manner similar to a developer. Our evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our AdbGPT to reproduce 81.3% of bug reports in 253.6 seconds, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines and ablation studies. We also conduct a small-scale user study to confirm the usefulness of AdbGPT in enhancing developers' bug replay capabilities.

Precise retrieval of scientific information is fundamentally constrained by long-tailed concepts and high fact-sensitivity of scientific corpora. These challenges often limit the effectiveness of dense retrievers and hallucination-prone LLM augmentation. To address this, we present REPAIR, a self-evolving data augmentation framework for scientific dense retrievers. REPAIR iteratively synthesizes training data to address knowledge gaps by cycling through diagnosis of long-tail concepts, API-guided evidence expansion, and differentiation via hard negative mining. This process effectively grounds retrieval in factual reality to resolve fine-grained distinctions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REPAIR significantly outperforms 19 strong baselines on nine materials science and biomedical benchmarks. Our work highlights that diagnosing and factually augmenting data to long-tail deficits is essential for robust scientific retrieval.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in downstream software engineering tasks such as Automated Program Repair (APR). In particular, there has been a lot of research on repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-Bench. Although there has been significant progress on this topic, we notice that in the process of solving such issues, existing agentic systems tend to hyper-localize on immediately suspicious lines of code and fix them in isolation, without a deeper understanding of the issue semantics, code semantics, or execution semantics. Consequently, many existing systems generate patches that overfit to the user issue, even when a more general fix is preferable. To address this limitation, we introduce SemAgent, a novel workflow-based procedure that leverages issue, code, and execution semantics to generate patches that are complete - identifying and fixing all lines relevant to the issue. We achieve this through a novel pipeline that (a) leverages execution semantics to retrieve relevant context, (b) comprehends issue-semantics via generalized abstraction, (c) isolates code-semantics within the context of this abstraction, and (d) leverages this understanding in a two-stage architecture: a repair stage that proposes fine-grained fixes, followed by a reviewer stage that filters relevant fixes based on the inferred issue-semantics. Our evaluations show that our methodology achieves a solve rate of 44.66% on the SWEBench-Lite benchmark beating all other workflow-based approaches, and an absolute improvement of 7.66% compared to our baseline, which lacks such deep semantic understanding. We note that our approach performs particularly well on issues requiring multi-line reasoning (and editing) and edge-case handling, suggesting that incorporating issue and code semantics into APR pipelines can lead to robust and semantically consistent repairs.

Research shows that grammatical mistakes in a sentence can be corrected by translating it to another language and back using neural machine translation with language models. We investigate whether this correction capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) extends to Automatic Program Repair (APR). Current generative models for APR are pre-trained on source code and fine-tuned for repair. This paper proposes bypassing the fine-tuning step and using Round-Trip Translation (RTT): translation of code from one programming language to another programming or natural language, and back. We hypothesize that RTT with LLMs restores the most commonly seen patterns in code during pre-training, i.e., performs a regression toward the mean, which removes bugs as they are a form of noise w.r.t. the more frequent, natural, bug-free code in the training data. To test this hypothesis, we employ eight recent LLMs pre-trained on code, including the latest GPT versions, and four common program repair benchmarks in Java. We find that RTT with English as an intermediate language repaired 101 of 164 bugs with GPT-4 on the HumanEval-Java dataset. Moreover, 46 of these are unique bugs that are not repaired by other LLMs fine-tuned for APR. Our findings highlight the viability of round-trip translation with LLMs as a technique for automated program repair and its potential for research in software engineering. Keywords: automated program repair, large language model, machine translation

Program errors can occur in any type of programming, and can manifest in a variety of ways, such as unexpected output, crashes, or performance issues. And program error diagnosis can often be too abstract or technical for developers to understand, especially for beginners. The goal of this paper is to present a novel machine-learning approach for Multi-task Program Error Repair and Explanatory Diagnosis (mPRED). A pre-trained language model is used to encode the source code, and a downstream model is specifically designed to identify and repair errors. Programs and test cases will be augmented and optimized from several perspectives. Additionally, our approach incorporates a "chain of thoughts" method, which enables the models to produce intermediate reasoning explanations before providing the final correction. To aid in visualizing and analyzing the program structure, we use a graph neural network for program structure visualization. Overall, our approach offers a promising approach for repairing program errors across different programming languages and providing helpful explanations to programmers.

Executable Agent Skills combine natural-language instructions and scripts into reusable packages for LLM agents, and revising them requires fixing errors without breaking correct behavior. Existing benchmarks do not systematically distinguish documentation repair, script repair, and preservation when evaluating skill self-evolution. We introduce SkillScriptBench, a 350-task benchmark designed to evaluate these capabilities separately. From a survey of over 35,000 GitHub-hosted Skill roots, we select 100 packages and construct 150 repair tasks. Each task pairs a package containing injected script faults with a maintenance request and executable checks of the required behavior. A complementary controlled track contains 200 tasks from 50 packages, each evaluated under the same maintenance request in four states: clean, documentation faults, script faults, and faults in both. Across four LLMs, methods that edit both documentation and scripts can repair script faults but do not consistently outperform Markdown-only revision on documentation repair or preservation. We therefore introduce AST-Guided Skill Revision, which uses abstract syntax trees and calling relationships to link maintenance requirements to relevant code locations. It restricts script edits to these locations and updates the documentation to match the revised scripts. Averaged across models, this revision stage yields absolute gains in repair success of 21.9% for Raw Package and 27.7% for CoEvoSkills on faulty packages. Absolute gains in the proportion of tasks solved in all three runs reach 20.8% and 31.5%, respectively, indicating more consistent repair success across repeated runs.

With the growing interest on Large Language Models (LLMs) for fault localization and program repair, ensuring the integrity and generalizability of the LLM-based methods becomes paramount. The code in existing widely-adopted benchmarks for these tasks was written before the the bloom of LLMs and may be included in the training data of existing popular LLMs, thereby suffering from the threat of data leakage, leading to misleadingly optimistic performance metrics. To address this issue, we introduce "ConDefects", a novel dataset of real faults meticulously curated to eliminate such overlap. ConDefects contains 1,254 Java faulty programs and 1,625 Python faulty programs. All these programs are sourced from the online competition platform AtCoder and were produced between October 2021 and September 2023. We pair each fault with fault locations and the corresponding repaired code versions, making it tailored for in fault localization and program repair related research. We also provide interfaces for selecting subsets based on different time windows and coding task difficulties. While inspired by LLM-based tasks, ConDefects can be adopted for benchmarking ALL types of fault localization and program repair methods. The dataset is publicly available, and a demo video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22j15Hj5ONk.

Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report. Evaluations centered on question answering or script generation rarely verify this complete evidence chain and may therefore reward fluent outputs even when the underlying engineering workflow is incomplete, internally inconsistent, or non-executable. To address this limitation, we present StructureClaw, an artifact-centered workbench in which LLM agents operate through governed engineering skills, typed tools, shared artifact state, and local analysis backends. We also introduce StructureClaw-Bench, an executable benchmark of 150 controlled scenarios spanning standard workflow execution, interactive robustness, and multimodal structural-model reconstruction. A scenario succeeds only when all required artifact- and execution-level assertions pass in a single run. Across ten agent-model configurations, each evaluated on the same 50 standard cases, the average Success Rate rises from 56.8% with the generic-skill baseline to 88.6% with the full automatic workflow. The interactive and multimodal evaluations identify two prominent remaining challenges: safe handling of invalid numerical inputs and fixture-consistent reconstruction of structural models. These findings show that artifact-centered evaluation can expose workflow-level failures that are difficult to identify from final responses alone, providing a more rigorous basis for evaluating and improving structural-engineering agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/structureclaw/structureclaw.

Most programmers make mistakes when writing code. Some of these mistakes are small and require few edits to the original program -- a class of errors recently termed last mile mistakes. These errors break the flow for experienced developers and can stump novice programmers. Existing automated repair techniques targeting this class of errors are language-specific and do not easily carry over to new languages. Transferring symbolic approaches requires substantial engineering and neural approaches require data and retraining. We introduce RING, a multilingual repair engine powered by a large language model trained on code (LLMC) such as Codex. Such a multilingual engine enables a flipped model for programming assistance, one where the programmer writes code and the AI assistance suggests fixes, compared to traditional code suggestion technology. Taking inspiration from the way programmers manually fix bugs, we show that a prompt-based strategy that conceptualizes repair as localization, transformation, and candidate ranking, can successfully repair programs in multiple languages with minimal effort. We present the first results for such a multilingual repair engine by evaluating on 6 different languages and comparing performance to language-specific repair engines. We show that RING can outperform language-specific repair engines for three of these languages.

Security patches for open-source software constitute a foundational resource for vulnerability remediation research and practice. However, analyzing and applying multiple patches remains challenging, especially when trying to determine at what point in a patch sequence a vulnerability is fully remediated. This paper presents a systematic analysis of multi-patch vulnerability fixes, focusing on their root causes, characteristics, and methods for verifying remediation status throughout the fixing process. Through a manual examination of 1,646 multi-patch fix records, we develop a taxonomy with three primary categories and six subcategories based on their causes. We then compare the distinctive characteristics of multi-patch fixes with those of single-patch fixes and analyze feature variations across categories. In addition, we assess representative vulnerability detection methods for validating complete remediation during multi-patch fixing. Our findings provide new insights into multi-patch fixes and lay a foundation for future research in this field.

Flaw reporting for deployed AI systems is fundamental to identifying system failures and improving AI safety. Yet the AI reporting ecosystem is fragmented: researchers who identify flaws often do not know what or where to report, and groups who receive reports rarely share them with other relevant stakeholders. As a result, good-faith reporters duplicate effort by submitting many different forms, and recipients lack standardized, triage-ready information. We audit 12 reporting systems published by AI developers, cybersecurity groups, and AI flaw aggregators, identifying five recurring design challenges spanning discoverability, scope, information collection, coordination, and guidance for strict-liability cases. Building on this analysis and feedback from 49 experts across 32 organizations representing developers, security researchers, and ecosystem coordinators, we introduce FLARE-AI, an open-source AI flaw reporting system designed for interoperability with existing systems. FLARE-AI streamlines flaw report creation by collecting triage-relevant information through conditional logic and early classification, then enables optional dissemination of standardized, machine-readable reports to multiple developers, coordinators, and incident registries from a single submission. By lowering barriers to reporting AI flaws and improving interoperability across stakeholders, FLARE-AI helps break down silos and accelerate remediation across the AI ecosystem.

Existing evaluations often reduce agent failures to system-level outcomes, obscuring where the fault originated and which intervention would improve the agent system. This creates a repair-assignment problem: the same visible failure may call for model post-training, harness engineering, environment redesign, or benchmark repair depending on its source. Because agent behavior emerges from interactions among models, harnesses, users, tools, memory, and environments, outcome-level labels are often insufficient for improvement. Most failure taxonomies do little to resolve this problem because they are benchmark-specific and lack a shared structure. We introduce an interaction-centric taxonomy that localizes failures to the interactions in which they originate and identifies the responsible component. It organizes 41 failure modes by assigning each to an edge between two components and a fault side indicating where the repair belongs. This makes the taxonomy actionable: model-side failures identify targets for post-training, harness-side failures point to scaffolding and tool-integration fixes, and environment or grader failures reveal evaluation conditions requiring redesign. The schema applies across agent architectures, from coding assistants to long-horizon personal assistants and multi-agent systems. We ground the taxonomy in worked examples from public benchmarks, model system cards, published reports, and logged agent trajectories, and evaluate its reproducibility using independent reasoning agents as judges. Across four frontier models, the strongest judge reaches Cohen's κ=0.76 against human category labels, suggesting that the categories capture shared structure rather than annotator-specific preferences.

Software documentation frequently becomes outdated or fails to exist entirely, yet developers need focused views of their codebase to understand complex systems. While automated reverse engineering tools can generate UML diagrams from code, they produce overwhelming detail without considering developer intent. We introduce query-driven UML diagram generation, where LLMs create diagrams that directly answer natural language questions about code. Unlike existing methods, our approach produces semantically focused diagrams containing only relevant elements with contextual descriptions. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-Coder-14B on a curated dataset of code files, developer queries, and corresponding diagram representations in a structured JSON format, evaluating with both automatic detection of structural defects and human assessment of semantic relevance. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning on a modest amount of manually corrected data yields dramatic improvements: our best model achieves the highest F1 scores while reducing defect rates below state-of-the-art LLMs, generating diagrams that are both structurally sound and semantically faithful to developer queries. Thus, we establish the feasibility of using LLMs for scalable contextual, on-demand documentation generation. We make our code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/i-need-a-pencil/query2diagram.

Repository-grounded automated repair is often reported as a single end-to-end capability, which hides distinct failure modes such as poor file targeting, incorrect patch synthesis, and failed iterative debugging. We present Loc2Repair, a modular evaluation framework for controlled analysis of repository-grounded repair pipelines, and use it to isolate file-level issue localization as an upstream variable. Loc2Repair decouples localization and repair under a shared runtime, artifact schema, and evaluation harness, allowing researchers to combine different localization models and repair backbones under matched conditions. Using three repair backbones on SWE-bench Verified, we compare baseline repair without explicit localization, repair guided by predicted localization from two localizers, and repair guided by gold modified-file sets. Explicit localization consistently improves resolved rate across all backbones: pooled performance increases from 44.7% for baseline repair to 48.9% and 49.1% with predicted localization, and to 52.4% with gold localization. Localization also reduces mean elapsed time overall: in pooled paired analysis, mean elapsed time decreases by 100.94 s and 52.25 s for the two predicted-localization settings, and by 154.45 s with gold guidance, although token effects remain heterogeneous across models. Overall, Loc2Repair shows file-level localization is a consistent repair lever, improving effectiveness and mean latency in pooled analysis, while gold-guided failures expose headroom beyond localization.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming automated program repair (APR) through agent-based approaches that localize bugs, generate patches, and verify fixes. However, the lack of high-quality, scalable training datasets, especially those with verifiable outputs and intermediate reasoning traces-limits progress, particularly for open-source models. In this work, we present SWE-Synth, a framework for synthesizing realistic, verifiable, and process-aware bug-fix datasets at the repository level. SWE-Synth leverages LLM agents to simulate debugging workflows, producing not only bug-fix pairs but also test cases and structured repair trajectories. Compared to manually curated datasets, our method scales with minimal human effort while preserving contextual richness and correctness. Experiments show that models trained on SWE-Synth outperform those trained on real-world datasets by 2.3% on SWE-Bench Lite. Our results highlight the potential of synthetic, agent-generated data to advance the state of the art in APR and software engineering automation.

Automated Program Repair (APR) can help developers automatically generate patches for bugs. Due to the impressive performance obtained using Large Pre-Trained Language Models (LLMs) on many code related tasks, researchers have started to directly use LLMs for APR. However, prior approaches simply repeatedly sample the LLM given the same constructed input/prompt created from the original buggy code, which not only leads to generating the same incorrect patches repeatedly but also miss the critical information in testcases. To address these limitations, we propose conversational APR, a new paradigm for program repair that alternates between patch generation and validation in a conversational manner. In conversational APR, we iteratively build the input to the model by combining previously generated patches with validation feedback. As such, we leverage the long-term context window of LLMs to not only avoid generating previously incorrect patches but also incorporate validation feedback to help the model understand the semantic meaning of the program under test. We evaluate 10 different LLM including the newly developed ChatGPT model to demonstrate the improvement of conversational APR over the prior LLM for APR approach.

Platform-orchestrated agentic workflows have become a popular paradigm for developing LLM-based applications. However, their reliability remains a major challenge due to the uncertainty of LLM outputs, complex inter-node dependencies, and heterogeneous tool interactions. Existing agentic workflow optimization and agent enhancement methods primarily rely on trajectory-level feedback. Without explicitly identifying the underlying failure root causes, their resulting repair plans are often insufficiently targeted. We propose FlowFixer, a diagnosis-driven automated repair framework for agentic workflows. FlowFixer first transforms workflow executions into unified symbolic traces and performs symbolic inference to derive executable behavioral specifications that capture node correctness, temporal dependencies, and causal relationships. Based on specification verification, it conducts failure attribution and root cause analysis, and then generates targeted repair patches. To reduce verification costs, FlowFixer further employs a multi-dimensional pre-execution assessment to filter infeasible repairs before dynamic verification. We evaluate FlowFixer on workflow failures collected from three popular development platforms: Dify, Coze and n8n. Results show that FlowFixer achieves a repair success rate of 71.3%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 11.9% to 27.6%. It also improves failure attribution accuracy by 4.8% to 33.1% and root cause analysis accuracy by 15.3% to 38.8%. This work offers a new perspective on reliable diagnosis and repair of agentic workflows through symbolic modeling and inference.

In this report, we present our champion solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 2: Chart Understanding. This track requires models to recover structured chart data and generate faithful natural-language summaries from chart images. To address the complementary requirements of accurate data extraction and factual narration, we propose ChartLens, a dual-branch framework for chart data correction and summary refinement. ChartLens consists of two key modules: Structure-Aware CSV Verification and Correction (SAVC) and Text-Retention-Guided Summary Refinement (TRSR). SAVC improves the reliability of structured data extraction through verification and correction, while TRSR enhances summary generation by preserving critical textual and numerical evidence from charts. By combining model adaptation, correction-based generation, and OCR-assisted evidence grounding, ChartLens improves both structured data recovery and summary factuality. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 69.10 and ranks first in Track 2, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate chart understanding. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ChartLens.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a variety of complex tasks. One significant application of LLMs is in tackling software engineering challenges, particularly in resolving real-world tasks on GitHub by fixing code based on the issues reported by the users. However, many current approaches rely on proprietary LLMs, which limits reproducibility, accessibility, and transparency. The critical components of LLMs for addressing software engineering issues and how their capabilities can be effectively enhanced remain unclear. To address these challenges, we introduce SWE-Fixer, a novel open-source LLM designed to effectively and efficiently resolve GitHub issues. SWE-Fixer comprises two essential modules: a code file retrieval module and a code editing module. The retrieval module employs BM25 along with a lightweight LLM model to achieve coarse-to-fine file retrieval. Subsequently, the code editing module utilizes the other LLM model to generate patches for the identified files. Then, to mitigate the lack of publicly available datasets, we compile an extensive dataset that includes 110K GitHub issues along with their corresponding patches, and train the two modules of SWE-Fixer separately. We assess our approach on the SWE-Bench Lite and Verified benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models with scores of 23.3% and 30.2%, respectively. These outcomes highlight the efficacy of our approach. We will make our model, dataset, and code publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/SWE-Fixer.

Context: Bugs in code are inevitable and can lead to severe consequences, ranging from security vulnerabilities to operational failures. Debugging software remains challenging despite advances in testing and verification, often requiring extensive manual effort. Learning-based automated program repair (APR) has shown promise in reducing the time, effort, and cost of manually fixing bugs. However, existing techniques face several challenges, including language-dependent strategies, limited bug context utilization, and difficulties in handling bugs that span multiple locations in the code. Objective: This paper introduces MultiMend, a learning-based APR approach designed to improve repair performance on multiple programming languages with language-independent context augmentation and multi-hunk patch generation. Method: MultiMend fine-tunes a pre-trained encoder-decoder transformer model (CodeT5) to generate bug-fixing patches. It embeds source code lines and applies retrieval-augmented generation to augment the buggy context with relevant lines during patch generation. The approach systematically constructs patches for multi-hunk bugs to reduce the needed patch validations. We evaluate MultiMend on four benchmarks with four programming languages and compare it with state-of-the-art methods. Results: Experimental results show that MultiMend achieves competitive effectiveness and efficiency against compared tools. Across all benchmarks, MultiMend fixes 2,077 bugs, of which 1,455 are identical to the developer's patch, and 106 are for multi-hunk bugs. Both context augmentation and multi-hunk patch generation positively contribute to the results. Conclusion: MultiMend shows promising performance across benchmarks. The findings highlight its applicability to real-world software maintenance and its potential to reduce manual debugging efforts.

This paper introduces Patched Round-Trip Correctness (Patched RTC), a novel evaluation technique for Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to diverse software development tasks, particularly focusing on "outer loop" activities such as bug fixing, code review, and documentation updates. Patched RTC extends the original Round-Trip Correctness method to work with any LLM and downstream task, offering a self-evaluating framework that measures consistency and robustness of model responses without human intervention. The study demonstrates a correlation between Patched RTC scores and task-specific accuracy metrics, presenting it as an alternative to the LLM-as-Judge paradigm for open-domain task evaluation. We implement Patched RTC in an open-source framework called patchwork, allowing for transparent evaluation during inference across various patchflows. Experiments comparing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models across different software development tasks reveal that Patched RTC effectively distinguishes model performance and task difficulty. The paper also explores the impact of consistency prompts on improving model accuracy, suggesting that Patched RTC can guide prompt refinement and model selection for complex software development workflows.

Large Language Models, particularly decoder-only generative models such as GPT, are increasingly used to automate Software Engineering tasks. These models are primarily guided through natural language prompts, making prompt engineering a critical factor in system performance and behavior. Despite their growing role in SE research, prompt-related decisions are rarely documented in a systematic or transparent manner, hindering reproducibility and comparability across studies. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase empirical study. First, we analyzed nearly 300 papers published at the top-3 SE conferences since 2022 to assess how prompt design, testing, and optimization are currently reported. Second, we surveyed 105 program committee members from these conferences to capture their expectations for prompt reporting in LLM-driven research. Based on the findings, we derived a structured guideline that distinguishes essential, desirable, and exceptional reporting elements. Our results reveal significant misalignment between current practices and reviewer expectations, particularly regarding version disclosure, prompt justification, and threats to validity. We present our guideline as a step toward improving transparency, reproducibility, and methodological rigor in LLM-based SE research.

Iterative repair loops have become a core design pattern in LLM-based software engineering systems. These workflows repeatedly generate, validate, and repair artifacts using feedback such as compiler errors or test failures. Despite their widespread use, the impact of repair-loop iteration limits remains poorly understood, as most prior work adopts fixed, often arbitrary, repair budgets. We study repair-loop effectiveness across multiple software engineering tasks, including code generation, test generation, and code translation. Across several representative workflows, datasets, and contemporary low-cost LLMs, we observe a consistent pattern of diminishing returns: the first three to four repair iterations account for most achievable gains, while later iterations contribute only marginal improvements. We further find that repair behavior is influenced more strongly by workflow orchestration and feedback design than by the underlying model itself. These results suggest that repair budgets should be treated as an explicit experimental variable, as they directly affect evaluation outcomes, computational cost, runtime, and reproducibility in LLM-based software engineering research.

Deep research requires models to retrieve, connect, and synthesize evidence from large-scale heterogeneous sources to answer complex queries and produce analytical reports. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate final outcomes, such as answer correctness, report quality, or citation alignment, while providing limited visibility into whether evidence is correctly selected, linked, and aggregated into supported claims and conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce HiEviDR-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating Hierarchical Evidence Aggregation in Deep Research. HiEviDR-Bench covers open-domain and academic-domain settings under both text-only and multimodal conditions, and represents each instance with an explicit evidence graph that captures evidence selection, cross-source linking, and aggregation from evidence to intermediate claims and final conclusions. Based on this formulation, we develop a traceability-oriented evaluation framework with five dimensions: report quality, evidence traceability, citation accuracy, claim verification, and answer correctness, together with a progressive gating mechanism for fine-grained error localization. HiEviDR-Bench contains 2,000 human-validated questions with evidence graphs across multiple difficulty levels. Experiments on 16 representative multimodal large language models show that, although many systems achieve strong report quality, their performance drops markedly on citation accuracy, claim construction, and answer correctness. Further analysis shows that the main bottlenecks lie in evidence identification and intermediate claim construction, revealing that strong surface-level report quality does not necessarily imply grounded multi-stage reasoning on our benchmark.

How much of a running workflow should a language model agent revise? ControlScope compares continuing generated code, editing the next tool call's data arguments, and replacing the unfinished workflow from the same public execution state. The nested permissions separate available repairs from the actions an agent selects. We evaluate one-time and repeated reviews across filesystem tasks, ALFWorld, and AppWorld. Across two source programs per task and three reasoning-reviewer draws on 20 filesystem tasks, FULL completes 15-16 tasks versus 13 for KEEP; across four fast draws it completes 10-13 versus 13. Fresh student-record confirmation reproduces a batch-read repair. ALFWorld fast panels yield KEEP/ARG/FULL scores of 85/86/87 on 87 tasks across 52 scenes and 134/134/127 on 134 tasks across four scenes; reasoning on the 87-task cohort also yields 85/86/87 with substantial review cost. An AppWorld V1 official-test panel of 585 task instances from 195 scenario templates shows small net differences. Frozen replays expose viable agent-written replacements interrupted by later revision in two failed file-organization runs. An offline source-trajectory midpoint comparison shows later reviews completing an insufficient repair. Five-call protection saves 19.4% of logged model output and loses one success across 20 fresh source runs. An argument-only shortcut shows that the broader sampled policy can overlook a cheaper successful edit available in both operation sets. These outcomes tie repair access to actual choices and subsequent execution.

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

LLM agents often retry after external validation rejects a candidate, but the interface between validation and the next model call remains underspecified. We introduce VeriHarness, a code-controlled agent loop in which models generate candidates while external validators control acceptance, budgets, and traces. We use it to compare raw diagnostics with feedback that identifies the failure location, observed value, and admissible alternatives. Across 50 paired TextWorld games under a four-call cap, feedback containing all three fields raises terminal success from 14/50 to 36/50 for Qwen2.5-Coder-14B (+44 percentage points) and from 8/50 to 29/50 for Llama-3.1-8B (+42 points). Ablations locate most of the gain in the admissible alternatives: feedback containing only the location and observed value remains near the raw diagnostic baseline. Presenting the complete repair information in prose instead of a keyed JSON record yields nearly the same success, providing no evidence that JSON syntax itself improves repair. The ordering persists across the tested call budgets and one sampled-decoding setting.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA.

APR (Automated Program Repair) aims to automatically locate program defects, generate patches and validate the repairs. Existing techniques for APR are often combined with LLMs (Large Language Models), which leverages the code-related knowledge of LLMs to improve repair effectiveness. Current LLM-based APR methods typically utilize test cases only during the inference stage, adopting an iterative approach that performs repair first and validates it through test execution afterward. This conventional paradigm neglects two important aspects: the potential contribution of test cases in the training phase, and the possibility of leveraging testing prior to repair. To address this, we propose Repair-R1, which introduces test cases into the model's training phase and shifts test generation to precede repair. The model is required to first generate discriminative test cases that can distinguish defective behaviors, and then perform repair based on these tests. This enables the model to better locate defects and understand the underlying causes of defects, thereby improving repair effectiveness. We implement Repair-R1 with three different backbone models, using RL (reinforcement learning) to co-optimize test generation and bug repair. Experimental results on four widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of Repair-R1. Specially, compared to vanilla models, Repair-R1 improves repair success rate by 2.68\% to 48.29\%, test generation success rate by 16.38\% to 53.28\%, and test coverage by 0.78\% to 53.96\%. We publish the code and weights at https://github.com/Tomsawyerhu/APR-RL and https://huggingface.co/tomhu/Qwen3-4B-RL-5000-step.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Within the realm of software engineering, specialized tasks on code, such as program repair, present unique challenges, necessitating fine-tuning to unlock state-of-the-art performance. Fine-tuning approaches proposed in the literature for LLMs on program repair tasks are however generally overlooking the need to reason about the logic behind code changes, beyond syntactic patterns in the data. High-performing fine-tuning experiments also usually come at very high computational costs. With MORepair, we propose a novel perspective on the learning focus of LLM fine-tuning for program repair: we not only adapt the LLM parameters to the syntactic nuances of the task of code transformation (objective 1), but we also specifically fine-tune the LLM with respect to the logical reason behind the code change in the training data (objective 2). Such a multi-objective fine-tuning will instruct LLMs to generate high-quality patches. We apply MORepair to fine-tune four open-source LLMs with different sizes and architectures. Experimental results on C++ and Java repair benchmarks show that the implemented fine-tuning effectively boosts LLM repair performance by 7.6% to 10% in Top-10 repair suggestions. We further show that our fine-tuning strategy yields superior performance compared to the incumbent state-of-the-art in fine-tuned models for program repair, Fine-tune-CoT and RepairLLaMA.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and task generalization. However, their application to structured data analysis remains fragile due to inconsistencies in schema interpretation, misalignment between user intent and model output, and limited mechanisms for self-correction when failures occur. This paper introduces the STROT Framework (Structured Task Reasoning and Output Transformation), a method for structured prompting and feedback-driven transformation logic generation aimed at improving the reliability and semantic alignment of LLM-based analytical workflows. STROT begins with lightweight schema introspection and sample-based field classification, enabling dynamic context construction that captures both the structure and statistical profile of the input data. This contextual information is embedded in structured prompts that guide the model toward generating task-specific, interpretable outputs. To address common failure modes in complex queries, STROT incorporates a refinement mechanism in which the model iteratively revises its outputs based on execution feedback and validation signals. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on static prompts or single-shot inference, STROT treats the LLM as a reasoning agent embedded within a controlled analysis loop -- capable of adjusting its output trajectory through planning and correction. The result is a robust and reproducible framework for reasoning over structured data with LLMs, applicable to diverse data exploration and analysis tasks where interpretability, stability, and correctness are essential.

In customer service technical support, swiftly and accurately retrieving relevant past issues is critical for efficiently resolving customer inquiries. The conventional retrieval methods in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for large language models (LLMs) treat a large corpus of past issue tracking tickets as plain text, ignoring the crucial intra-issue structure and inter-issue relations, which limits performance. We introduce a novel customer service question-answering method that amalgamates RAG with a knowledge graph (KG). Our method constructs a KG from historical issues for use in retrieval, retaining the intra-issue structure and inter-issue relations. During the question-answering phase, our method parses consumer queries and retrieves related sub-graphs from the KG to generate answers. This integration of a KG not only improves retrieval accuracy by preserving customer service structure information but also enhances answering quality by mitigating the effects of text segmentation. Empirical assessments on our benchmark datasets, utilizing key retrieval (MRR, Recall@K, NDCG@K) and text generation (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR) metrics, reveal that our method outperforms the baseline by 77.6% in MRR and by 0.32 in BLEU. Our method has been deployed within LinkedIn's customer service team for approximately six months and has reduced the median per-issue resolution time by 28.6%.

Sequence-to-sequence models have been used to transform erroneous programs into correct ones when trained with a large enough dataset. Some recent studies also demonstrated strong empirical evidence that code review could improve the program repair further. Large language models, trained with Natural Language (NL) and Programming Language (PL), can contain inherent knowledge of both. In this study, we investigate if this inherent knowledge of PL and NL can be utilized to improve automated program repair. We applied PLBART and CodeT5, two state-of-the-art language models that are pre-trained with both PL and NL, on two such natural language-based program repair datasets and found that the pre-trained language models fine-tuned with datasets containing both code review and subsequent code changes notably outperformed each of the previous models. With the advent of code generative models like Codex and GPT-3.5-Turbo, we also performed zero-shot and few-shots learning-based prompt engineering to assess their performance on these datasets. However, the practical application of using LLMs in the context of automated program repair is still a long way off based on our manual analysis of the generated repaired codes by the learning models.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs without human intervention and template-based APR has been widely investigated with promising results. However, it is challenging for template-based APR to select the appropriate donor code, which is an important repair ingredient for generating candidate patches. Inappropriate donor code may cause plausible but incorrect patch generation even with correct fix patterns, limiting the repair performance. In this paper, we aim to revisit template-based APR, and propose GAMMA, to directly leverage large pre-trained language models for donor code generation. Our main insight is that instead of retrieving donor code in the local buggy file, we can directly predict the correct code tokens based on the context code snippets and repair patterns by a cloze task. Specifically, (1) GAMMA revises a variety of fix templates from state-of-the-art template-based APR techniques (i.e., TBar) and transforms them into mask patterns. (2) GAMMA adopts a pre-trained language model to predict the correct code for masked code as a fill-in-the-blank task. The experimental results demonstrate that GAMMA correctly repairs 82 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, which achieves 20.59\% (14 bugs) and 26.15\% (17 bugs) improvement over the previous state-of-the-art template-based approach TBar and learning-based one Recoder. Furthermore, GAMMA repairs 45 bugs and 22 bugs from the additional Defects4J-v2.0 and QuixBugs, indicating the generalizability of GAMMA in addressing the dataset overfitting issue. We also prove that adopting other pre-trained language models can provide substantial advancement, e.g., CodeBERT-based and ChatGPT-based GAMMA is able to fix 80 and 67 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, indicating the scalability of GAMMA. Overall, our study highlights the promising future of adopting pre-trained models to generate correct patches on top of fix patterns.

The advent of Deep Research agents has substantially reduced the time required for conducting extensive research tasks. However, these tasks inherently demand rigorous standards of factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, necessitating thorough evaluation before widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose ReportBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the content quality of research reports generated by large language models (LLMs). Our evaluation focuses on two critical dimensions: (1) the quality and relevance of cited literature, and (2) the faithfulness and veracity of the statements within the generated reports. ReportBench leverages high-quality published survey papers available on arXiv as gold-standard references, from which we apply reverse prompt engineering to derive domain-specific prompts and establish a comprehensive evaluation corpus. Furthermore, we develop an agent-based automated framework within ReportBench that systematically analyzes generated reports by extracting citations and statements, checking the faithfulness of cited content against original sources, and validating non-cited claims using web-based resources. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that commercial Deep Research agents such as those developed by OpenAI and Google consistently generate more comprehensive and reliable reports than standalone LLMs augmented with search or browsing tools. However, there remains substantial room for improvement in terms of the breadth and depth of research coverage, as well as factual consistency. The complete code and data will be released at the following link: https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/ReportBench

Automated Program Repair (APR) is a task to automatically generate patches for the buggy code. However, most research focuses on generating correct patches while ignoring the consistency between the fixed code and the original buggy code. How to conduct adaptive bug fixing and generate patches with minimal modifications have seldom been investigated. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a novel task, namely AdaPR (Adaptive Program Repair). We then propose a two-stage approach AdaPatcher (Adaptive Patch Generator) to enhance program repair while maintaining the consistency. In the first stage, we utilize a Bug Locator with self-debug learning to accurately pinpoint bug locations. In the second stage, we train a Program Modifier to ensure consistency between the post-modified fixed code and the pre-modified buggy code. The Program Modifier is enhanced with a location-aware repair learning strategy to generate patches based on identified buggy lines, a hybrid training strategy for selective reference and an adaptive preference learning to prioritize fewer changes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, validating the effectiveness of our two-stage framework for the newly proposed AdaPR task.

Recent advances in large language models have enabled deep research systems that generate expert-level reports through multi-step reasoning and evidence-based synthesis. However, evaluating such reports remains challenging: report quality is multifaceted, making it difficult to determine what to assess and by what criteria; LLM-based judges may miss errors that require domain expertise to identify; and because deep research relies on retrieved evidence, report-wide claim verification is also necessary. To address these issues, we propose DEER, a benchmark for evaluating expert-level deep research reports. DEER systematizes evaluation criteria with an expert-developed taxonomy (7 dimensions, 25 subdimensions) operationalized as 101 fine-grained rubric items. We also provide task-specific Expert Evaluation Guidance to support LLM-based judging. Alongside rubric-based assessment, we propose a claim verification architecture that verifies both cited and uncited claims and quantifies evidence quality. Experiments show that while current deep research systems can produce structurally plausible reports that cite external evidence, there is room for improvement in fulfilling expert-level user requests and achieving logical completeness. Beyond simple performance comparisons, DEER makes system strengths and limitations interpretable and provides diagnostic signals for improvement.

This study examined code issue detection and revision automation by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o into software development workflows. A static code analysis framework detects issues such as bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells within a large-scale software project. Detailed information on each issue was extracted and organized to facilitate automated code revision using LLMs. An iterative prompt engineering process is applied to ensure that prompts are structured to produce accurate and organized outputs aligned with the project requirements. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is implemented to enhance the relevance and precision of the revisions, enabling LLM to access and integrate real-time external knowledge. The issue of LLM hallucinations - where the model generates plausible but incorrect outputs - is addressed by a custom-built "Code Comparison App," which identifies and corrects erroneous changes before applying them to the codebase. Subsequent scans using the static code analysis framework revealed a significant reduction in code issues, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining LLMs, static analysis, and RAG to improve code quality, streamline the software development process, and reduce time and resource expenditure.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in Deep Research or Wide Search, their capacity to solve highly complex questions-those requiring long-horizon planning, massive evidence gathering, and synthesis across heterogeneous sources-remains largely unexplored. We introduce Super Research, a task for complex autonomous research tasks that integrates (i) structured decomposition into a research plan, (ii) super wide retrieval for diverse perspectives, and (iii) super deep investigation to resolve uncertainties through iterative queries. To evaluate this capability, we curated a benchmark of 300 expert-written questions across diverse domains, each requiring up to 100+ retrieval steps and 1,000+ web pages to reconcile conflicting evidence. Super Research produces verifiable reports with fine-grained citations and intermediate artifacts (e.g., outlines and tables) to ensure traceable reasoning. Furthermore, we present a graph-anchored auditing protocol that evaluates Super Research along five dimensions: Coverage, Logical Consistency, Report Utility, Objectivity and Citation Health. While super-complex questions may be infrequent in standard applications, Super Research serves as a critical ceiling evaluation and stress test for LLM capabilities. A model's proficiency within Super Research acts as a powerful proxy for its general research competence; success here suggests the robustness necessary to navigate nearly any subordinate research task. Leaderboard is available at: https://cnsdqd-dyb.github.io/Super-Research-Benchmark/

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced automatic program repair (APR) to the point where agentic systems routinely resolve real-world, repository-level issues. Yet the generated patch has received little scrutiny beyond whether it passes tests. In this paper, we identify patch verbosity as a major yet overlooked concern in LLM-based APR. Characterizing 28 state-of-the-art approaches on SWE-bench Verified, we find that even successful patches are consistently larger and more complex than developer patches, with the median approach producing 121.78% more total changes, 80.91% more net changes, and 43.99% higher cyclomatic complexity. We further show that this verbosity is rooted in capability-oriented design choices such as iterative refinement and broad context, and can hardly be reduced by surface-level controls such as output format or minimality prompts. Motivated by these findings, we formulate post-generation patch refinement and propose RECAP, a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter that attaches to existing repair frameworks after generation. RECAP's refiner is trained via supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization with distilled reasoning traces, on a dataset of patch pairs we construct from multiple sources. Across four host systems, prompting, commit-untangling, and minimality-aware baselines reduce patch size only by sacrificing 49 to 217 resolved instances. In contrast, RECAP achieves a substantially better size-correctness tradeoff, cutting average total changes from +242.14% to +4.24% and net changes from +348.24% to -39.75% relative to developer patches while preserving or improving resolution by up to 42 instances. Our results indicate that minimality cannot be simply reduced to syntactic compression, and that decoupling minimization from generation offers a practical path to more reviewable repairs.

Incomplete or inconsistent discharge documentation drives care fragmentation and avoidable readmissions. Despite its critical role in patient safety, auditing discharge summaries relies on manual review and does not scale. We propose an automated framework for auditing discharge summaries using large language models (LLMs). Our approach operationalizes the DISCHARGED framework into a checklist of 46 questions. Using 50 summaries from the MIMIC-IV database, with clinician ground-truth labels, we benchmark 11 LLMs. Model-assessed mean documentation completeness ranges from 54.9% to 74.2%, and the best-performing models achieve a Cohen's kappa values around 0.5 against clinician labels, indicating moderate agreement. All models struggle to identify ambiguous documentation (Unclear), highlighting a key gap in current automated auditing. This work provides a clinician-validated benchmark and zero-shot baselines for systematic quality improvement in clinical documentation.

Medical report interpretation plays a crucial role in healthcare, enabling both patient-facing explanations and effective information flow across clinical systems. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated general document understanding capabilities, there remains a lack of standardized benchmarks to assess structured interpretation quality in medical reports. We introduce MedRepBench, a comprehensive benchmark built from 1,900 de-identified real-world Chinese medical reports spanning diverse departments, patient demographics, and acquisition formats. The benchmark is designed primarily to evaluate end-to-end VLMs for structured medical report understanding. To enable controlled comparisons, we also include a text-only evaluation setting using high-quality OCR outputs combined with LLMs, allowing us to estimate the upper-bound performance when character recognition errors are minimized. Our evaluation framework supports two complementary protocols: (1) an objective evaluation measuring field-level recall of structured clinical items, and (2) an automated subjective evaluation using a powerful LLM as a scoring agent to assess factuality, interpretability, and reasoning quality. Based on the objective metric, we further design a reward function and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve a mid-scale VLM, achieving up to 6% recall gain. We also observe that the OCR+LLM pipeline, despite strong performance, suffers from layout-blindness and latency issues, motivating further progress toward robust, fully vision-based report understanding.

Bug reports often lack sufficient detail for developers to reproduce and fix the underlying defects. Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs), tests that fail when the bug is present and pass when it has been resolved, are crucial for debugging, but they are rarely included in bug reports, both in open-source and in industrial settings. Thus, automatically generating BRTs from bug reports has the potential to accelerate the debugging process and lower time to repair. This paper investigates automated BRT generation within an industry setting, specifically at Google, focusing on the challenges of a large-scale, proprietary codebase and considering real-world industry bugs extracted from Google's internal issue tracker. We adapt and evaluate a state-of-the-art BRT generation technique, LIBRO, and present our agent-based approach, BRT Agent, which makes use of a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) for code editing. Our BRT Agent significantly outperforms LIBRO, achieving a 28% plausible BRT generation rate, compared to 10% by LIBRO, on 80 human-reported bugs from Google's internal issue tracker. We further investigate the practical value of generated BRTs by integrating them with an Automated Program Repair (APR) system at Google. Our results show that providing BRTs to the APR system results in 30% more bugs with plausible fixes. Additionally, we introduce Ensemble Pass Rate (EPR), a metric which leverages the generated BRTs to select the most promising fixes from all fixes generated by APR system. Our evaluation on EPR for Top-K and threshold-based fix selections demonstrates promising results and trade-offs. For example, EPR correctly selects a plausible fix from a pool of 20 candidates in 70% of cases, based on its top-1 ranking.

Evaluations should do more than measure a models current performance. They should tell us what to fix for the next model iteration and provide a way to generate targeted post training data. Most evaluation pipelines identify weak examples, topics, or categories, but they leave the underlying capability failure implicit: they say where a model fails, not why. We introduce CRAFT, a method that converts any rubric based evaluation dataset into a model specific diagnosis of weak capabilities. CRAFT treats each grading criterion as a capability probe: it extracts a capability description from every prompt rubric pair, clusters these descriptions into a hierarchical capability tree, scores the target model at every node, and selects low performing nodes dynamically across tree levels, at the granularity where each failure is clearest. The selected weak capabilities then direct the generation of targeted supervised finetuning data. Holding the data generation, finetuning, and evaluation setup fixed, we compare CRAFT against prompt level EvalTree clustering and untargeted random generation on four open source models, two professional domains (finance and legal), and 13 held out benchmarks disjoint from the diagnostic data. CRAFT achieves the strongest finance domain average for all four models under repeated temperature decoding; on legal domain, it is strongest for three of four models and remains within the decoding variance bands of the best baseline on the fourth. Diagnosing weaknesses at the level of rubric criteria, rather than prompts or categories, thus yields both a sharper picture of what a model cannot do and measurably better models after finetuning on that diagnosis.

Large language models have transformed code generation, enabling unprecedented automation in software development. As mobile ecosystems evolve, HarmonyOS has emerged as a critical platform requiring robust development tools. Software development for the HarmonyOS ecosystem relies heavily on ArkTS, a statically typed extension of TypeScript. Despite its growing importance, the ecosystem lacks robust tools for automated code repair, primarily due to the absence of a high-quality benchmark for evaluation. To address this gap, we present ArkEval, a unified framework for ArkTS automated repair workflow evaluation and benchmark construction. It provides the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for ArkTS automated program repair. We constructed this benchmark by mining issues from a large-scale official Huawei repository containing over 400 independent ArkTS applications. Through a rigorous multi-stage filtering process, we curated 502 reproducible issues. To ensure testability, we employed a novel LLM-based test generation and voting mechanism involving Claude and other models. Furthermore, we standardized problem statements to facilitate fair evaluation. Finally, we evaluated four state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) on our benchmark using a retrieval-augmented repair workflow. Our results highlight the current capabilities and limitations of LLMs in repairing ArkTS code, paving the way for future research in this low-resource language domain.

Medical imaging is widely used in clinical practice for diagnosis and treatment. Report-writing can be error-prone for unexperienced physicians, and time- consuming and tedious for experienced physicians. To address these issues, we study the automatic generation of medical imaging reports. This task presents several challenges. First, a complete report contains multiple heterogeneous forms of information, including findings and tags. Second, abnormal regions in medical images are difficult to identify. Third, the re- ports are typically long, containing multiple sentences. To cope with these challenges, we (1) build a multi-task learning framework which jointly performs the pre- diction of tags and the generation of para- graphs, (2) propose a co-attention mechanism to localize regions containing abnormalities and generate narrations for them, (3) develop a hierarchical LSTM model to generate long paragraphs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on two publicly available datasets.

Post-training for large language models (LLMs) is constrained by the high cost of acquiring new knowledge or correcting errors and by the unintended side effects that frequently arise from retraining. To address these issues, we introduce REPAIR (Robust Editing via Progressive Adaptive Intervention and Reintegration), a lifelong editing framework designed to support precise and low-cost model updates while preserving non-target knowledge. REPAIR mitigates the instability and conflicts of large-scale sequential edits through a closed-loop feedback mechanism coupled with dynamic memory management. Furthermore, by incorporating frequent knowledge fusion and enforcing strong locality guards, REPAIR effectively addresses the shortcomings of traditional distribution-agnostic approaches that often overlook unintended ripple effects. Our experiments demonstrate that REPAIR boosts editing accuracy by 10%-30% across multiple model families and significantly reduces knowledge forgetting. This work introduces a robust framework for developing reliable, scalable, and continually evolving LLMs.

The rapid advancement of bug-finding techniques has led to the discovery of more vulnerabilities than developers can reasonably fix, creating an urgent need for effective Automated Program Repair (APR) methods. However, the complexity of modern bugs often makes precise root cause analysis difficult and unreliable. To address this challenge, we propose crash-site repair to simplify the repair task while still mitigating the risk of exploitation. In addition, we introduce a template-guided patch generation approach that significantly reduces the token cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) while maintaining both efficiency and effectiveness. We implement our prototype system, WILLIAMT, and evaluate it against state-of-the-art APR tools. Our results show that, when combined with the top-performing agent CodeRover-S, WILLIAMT reduces token cost by 45.9% and increases the bug-fixing rate to 73.5% (+29.6%) on ARVO, a ground-truth open source software vulnerabilities benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that WILLIAMT can function effectively even without access to frontier LLMs: even a local model running on a Mac M4 Mini achieves a reasonable repair rate. These findings highlight the broad applicability and scalability of WILLIAMT.

While Large Language Models have greatly advanced automated issue resolution, existing agent-based methods exhibit a fundamental limitation in their insufficient exploration of repair strategies. This insufficiency manifests in two key aspects. First, the exploration of multiple potential edit locations is limited. Second, the exploration of repair attempts at each location is also insufficient. To address these challenges, we present PhoenixRepair, a multi-agent framework that systematically explores multiple candidate edit locations and performs iterative reflection and refinement on patch generation, thereby expanding the search space of repair strategies. Our framework begins with multi-location sampling, optionally augmented with graph-based localization information for difficult tasks, followed by iterative reflection and refinement to generate better patches, culminating in final-round generation guided by distilled insights from all historical attempts. Experiments on SWE-bench-Verified demonstrate that PhoenixRepair achieves the largest relative improvement of 7.8\% over SWE-agent under DeepSeek-V3.1, and attains the highest resolved rate of 76.0\% Pass@1 under MiniMax-M2.5. Meanwhile, it achieves higher fault localization accuracy than existing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/PhoenixRepair.

In software development, bug report reproduction is a challenging task. This paper introduces ReBL, a novel feedback-driven approach that leverages GPT-4, a large-scale language model, to automatically reproduce Android bug reports. Unlike traditional methods, ReBL bypasses the use of Step to Reproduce (S2R) entities. Instead, it leverages the entire textual bug report and employs innovative prompts to enhance GPT's contextual reasoning. This approach is more flexible and context-aware than the traditional step-by-step entity matching approach, resulting in improved accuracy and effectiveness. In addition to handling crash reports, ReBL has the capability of handling non-crash bug reports. Our evaluation of 96 Android bug reports (73 crash and 23 non-crash) demonstrates that ReBL successfully reproduced 90.63% of these reports, averaging only 74.98 seconds per bug report. Additionally, ReBL outperformed three existing tools in both success rate and speed.

Evaluating novelty is critical yet challenging in peer review, as reviewers must assess submissions against a vast, rapidly evolving literature. This report presents OpenNovelty, an LLM-powered agentic system for transparent, evidence-based novelty analysis. The system operates through four phases: (1) extracting the core task and contribution claims to generate retrieval queries; (2) retrieving relevant prior work based on extracted queries via semantic search engine; (3) constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of core-task-related work and performing contribution-level full-text comparisons against each contribution; and (4) synthesizing all analyses into a structured novelty report with explicit citations and evidence snippets. Unlike naive LLM-based approaches, OpenNovelty grounds all assessments in retrieved real papers, ensuring verifiable judgments. We deploy our system on 500+ ICLR 2026 submissions with all reports publicly available on our website, and preliminary analysis suggests it can identify relevant prior work, including closely related papers that authors may overlook. OpenNovelty aims to empower the research community with a scalable tool that promotes fair, consistent, and evidence-backed peer review.

We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become key components of modern software, with prompts acting as their de-facto programming interface. However, prompt design remains largely empirical and small mistakes can cascade into unreliable, insecure, or inefficient behavior. This paper presents the first systematic survey and taxonomy of prompt defects, recurring ways that prompts fail to elicit their intended behavior from LLMs. We organize defects along six dimensions: (1) Specification and Intent, (2) Input and Content, (3) Structure and Formatting, (4) Context and Memory, (5) Performance and Efficiency, and (6) Maintainability and Engineering. Each dimension is refined into fine-grained subtypes, illustrated with concrete examples and root cause analysis. Grounded in software engineering principles, we show how these defects surface in real development workflows and examine their downstream effects. For every subtype, we distill mitigation strategies that span emerging prompt engineering patterns, automated guardrails, testing harnesses, and evaluation frameworks. We then summarize these strategies in a master taxonomy that links defect, impact, and remedy. We conclude with open research challenges and a call for rigorous engineering-oriented methodologies to ensure that LLM-driven systems are dependable by design.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive effectiveness in various software engineering tasks, including automated program repair (APR). In this study, we take a deep dive into automated bug fixing utilizing LLMs. In contrast to many deep learning-based APR methods that assume known bug locations, rely on line-level localization tools, or address bug prediction and fixing in one step, our approach uniquely employs LLMs to predict bug location at the token level and subsequently utilizes them for bug fixing. This methodological separation of bug localization and fixing using different LLMs enables effective integration of diverse contextual information and improved incorporation of inductive biases. We introduce Toggle: Token-Granulated Bug Localization and Repair, a comprehensive program repair framework that integrates a bug localization model, an adjustment unit, and a bug-fixing model. Toggle takes a buggy function as input and generates a complete corrected function. We investigate various styles of prompting to the bug fixing model to identify the most effective prompts that better utilize the inductive bias and significantly outperform others. Toggle achieves the new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the CodeXGLUE code refinement benchmark, and exhibits better and comparable performance on several other widely-used APR datasets, including Defects4J.

Establishing precise traceability between embedded systems datasheets and their corresponding code implementations remains a fundamental challenge in systems engineering, particularly for low-level software where manual mapping between specification documents and large code repositories is infeasible. Existing Traceability Link Recovery approaches primarily rely on lexical similarity and information retrieval techniques, which struggle to capture the semantic, structural, and symbol level relationships prevalent in embedded systems software. We present a hierarchical datasheet-to-code mapping methodology that employs large language models for semantic analysis while explicitly structuring the traceability process across multiple abstraction levels. Rather than performing direct specification-to-code matching, the proposed approach progressively narrows the search space through repository-level structure inference, file-level relevance estimation, and fine-grained symbollevel alignment. The method extends beyond function-centric mapping by explicitly covering macros, structs, constants, configuration parameters, and register definitions commonly found in systems-level C/C++ codebases. We evaluate the approach on multiple open-source embedded systems repositories using manually curated datasheet-to-code ground truth. Experimental results show substantial improvements over traditional information-retrieval-based baselines, achieving up to 73.3% file mapping accuracy. We significantly reduce computational overhead, lowering total LLM token consumption by 84% and end-to-end runtime by approximately 80%. This methodology supports automated analysis of large embedded software systems and enables downstream applications such as training data generation for systems-aware machine learning models, standards compliance verification, and large-scale specification coverage analysis.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for clinical reasoning and decision support, but evaluation in realistic, electronic health record-congruent settings remains limited. Existing benchmarks often rely on static datasets or unstructured inputs that do not reflect the structured, interoperable data formats used in clinical systems. We introduce a pipeline for generating clinically realistic HL7 FHIR R4 bundles from unstructured text, enabling controllable evaluation of clinical decision support systems. The pipeline combines staged LLM generation with terminology-grounded validation and repair to reduce hallucinated codes and enforce structural and semantic consistency. Applying this approach to MedCaseReasoning, we construct MedCase-Structured, a synthetic dataset aligned with clinician-authored diagnostic cases, achieving valid FHIR generation for 82.5% of cases. Evaluation on MedCase-Structured reveals consistently lower diagnostic accuracy for LLMs on structured FHIR inputs than with plain text, highlighting the importance of deployment-aligned benchmarking.

Large Language Models are increasingly being deployed to extract structured data from unstructured and semi-structured sources: parsing invoices, medical records, and converting PDF documents to database entries. Yet existing benchmarks for structured output generation either focus on schema compliance alone, or evaluate value correctness within a single source domain. We introduce SOB (The Structured Output Benchmark), a multi-source benchmark spanning three source modalities: native text, images, and audio conversations. All models receive a text-normalized representation of their context regardless of source modality; this deliberate design isolates structured-output capability from raw vision or speech-processing quality, ensuring a fair, source-agnostic comparison. Our benchmark comprises 5,000 text evaluation records derived from multi-hop QA drawn from a 25,091-record full corpus, 209 image records from OCR-processed PDFs across seven document types including multi-column layouts, dense tables, scanned historical documents, small-print text, and mathematical typesetting, and 115 audio records from the AMI corpus. Each record pairs a natural-language question with a JSON schema that the model must follow and a ground-truth answer verified against the source context. We evaluate 21 frontier and open-weight models across three source domains and seven metrics. Our results reveal a consistent pattern: models achieve near-perfect schema compliance, yet the best Value Accuracy, measured by exact leaf-value match, reaches only 83.0% on text, 67.2% on images, and 23.7% on audio, where longer context makes extraction substantially harder. We release the dataset, evaluation pipeline, and all related code.

Current learning-based Automated Vulnerability Repair (AVR) approaches, while promising, often fail to generalize effectively in real-world scenarios. Our diagnostic analysis reveals three fundamental weaknesses in state-of-the-art AVR approaches: (1) limited cross-repository generalization, with performance drops on unseen codebases; (2) inability to capture long-range dependencies, causing a performance degradation on complex, multi-hunk repairs; and (3) over-reliance on superficial lexical patterns, leading to significant performance drops on vulnerabilities with minor syntactic variations like variable renaming. To address these limitations, we propose SeCuRepair, a semantics-aligned, curriculum-driven, and reasoning-enhanced framework for vulnerability repair. At its core, SeCuRepair adopts a reason-then-edit paradigm, requiring the model to articulate why and how a vulnerability should be fixed before generating the patch. This explicit reasoning enforces a genuine understanding of repair logic rather than superficial memorization of lexical patterns. SeCuRepair also moves beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning and employs semantics-aware reinforcement learning, rewarding patches for their syntactic and semantic alignment with the oracle patch rather than mere token overlap. Complementing this, a difficulty-aware curriculum progressively trains the model, starting with simple fixes and advancing to complex, multi-hunk coordinated edits. We evaluate SeCuRepair on strict, repository-level splits of BigVul and newly crafted PrimeVul_AVR datasets. SeCuRepair significantly outperforms all baselines, surpassing the best-performing baselines by 34.52% on BigVul and 31.52% on PrimeVulAVR in terms of CodeBLEU, respectively. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm that each component of our framework contributes to its final performance.

Verification for retrieval-augmented generation usually scores each retrieved chunk and drops the ones that fail. We show this cannot work for multi-hop questions, and show what does. Per-chunk scoring assumes one chunk is a sufficient premise for the answer. Multi-hop questions are built so that none is, and the paragraph carrying the answer is the one the question does not name. Entailment scoring reaches 0.643, 0.523 and 0.560 AUC on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA and MuSiQue, against 0.951 on single-hop SQuAD. Seven controls rule out model capacity, premise length, hypothesis template, decision threshold, retriever, answer-matching criterion and prompt. End to end across three datasets, three generator sizes and two prompts, per-chunk gating is significantly worse than not filtering at all in every cell, and its penalty grows with generator capability. The repair is to condition verification on the decomposed sub-question rather than the original query. Using MuSiQue's gold decomposition, entailment on a later hop rises from 0.546, which is chance, to 0.840, a paired lift of +0.355 with a bootstrap interval of [0.331, 0.382]. An off-the-shelf Qwen2.5-7B decomposer, given the question and the top retrieved paragraph, reaches 0.637 and captures 31% of that ceiling; decomposing without retrieval reaches 0.533, below the original question. Iterative retrieval systems already produce such decompositions and discard them before verifying.

Software specifications are essential for ensuring the reliability of software systems. Existing specification extraction approaches, however, suffer from limited generalizability and require manual efforts. The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have been successfully applied to numerous software engineering tasks, offers a promising avenue for automating this process. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs for generating software specifications from software comments or documentation. We evaluate LLMs' performance with Few Shot Learning (FSL), enabling LLMs to generalize from a small number of examples, as well as different prompt construction strategies, and compare the performance of LLMs with traditional approaches. Additionally, we conduct a comparative diagnosis of the failure cases from both LLMs and traditional methods, identifying their unique strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments on 15 state of the art LLMs, evaluating their performance and cost effectiveness for generating software specifications. Our results show that with FSL, LLMs outperform traditional methods (by 5.6%), and more sophisticated prompt construction strategies can further enlarge this performance gap (up to 5.1 to 10.0%). Yet, LLMs suffer from their unique challenges, such as ineffective prompts and the lack of domain knowledge, which together account for 53 to 60% of LLM unique failures. The strong performance of open source models (e.g., StarCoder) makes closed source models (e.g., GPT 3 Davinci) less desirable due to size and cost. Our study offers valuable insights for future research to improve specification generation.

Millions of open-source projects with numerous bug fixes are available in code repositories. This proliferation of software development histories can be leveraged to learn how to fix common programming bugs. To explore such a potential, we perform an empirical study to assess the feasibility of using Neural Machine Translation techniques for learning bug-fixing patches for real defects. First, we mine millions of bug-fixes from the change histories of projects hosted on GitHub, in order to extract meaningful examples of such bug-fixes. Next, we abstract the buggy and corresponding fixed code, and use them to train an Encoder-Decoder model able to translate buggy code into its fixed version. In our empirical investigation we found that such a model is able to fix thousands of unique buggy methods in the wild. Overall, this model is capable of predicting fixed patches generated by developers in 9-50% of the cases, depending on the number of candidate patches we allow it to generate. Also, the model is able to emulate a variety of different Abstract Syntax Tree operations and generate candidate patches in a split second.

Correcting bugs using modern Automated Program Repair (APR) can be both time-consuming and resource-expensive. We describe a program repair approach that aims to improve the scalability of modern APR tools. The approach leverages program reduction in the form of program slicing to eliminate code irrelevant to fixing the bug, which improves the APR tool's overall performance. We investigate slicing's impact on all three phases of the repair process: fault localization, patch generation, and patch validation. Our empirical exploration finds that the proposed approach, on average, enhances the repair ability of the TBar APR tool, but we also discovered a few cases where it was less successful. Specifically, on examples from the widely used Defects4J dataset, we obtain a substantial reduction in median repair time, which falls from 80 minutes to just under 18 minutes. We conclude that program reduction can improve the performance of APR without degrading repair quality, but this improvement is not universal. A replication package is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13074333. Keywords: automated program repair, dynamic program slicing, fault localization, test-suite reduction, hybrid techniques.

Automatically repairing software issues remains a fundamental challenge at the intersection of software engineering and AI. Although recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for repository-level repair tasks, current methodologies exhibit two notable limitations: (1) they often address issues in isolation, neglecting to incorporate insights from previously resolved issues, and (2) they rely on static and rigid prompting strategies, which constrain their ability to generalize across diverse and evolving issue scenarios. Inspired by the dual memory systems of human cognition, where episodic and semantic memories work synergistically to support human reasoning and decision-making, we propose ExpeRepair, a novel LLM-based approach that continuously learns from historical repair experiences through dual-channel knowledge accumulation. ExpeRepair organizes historical repair experiences into two complementary memories: an episodic memory that stores concrete repair demonstrations, and a semantic memory that encodes abstract reflective insights. At inference time, ExpeRepair activates both memory systems by retrieving relevant demonstrations from episodic memory and recalling high-level repair insights from semantic memory. It further enhances adaptability through dynamic prompt composition, synergistically integrating both memory types to replace static prompts with context-aware, experience-driven prompts. Experiments on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark demonstrate that ExpeRepair achieves a pass@1 score of 49.3% with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, outperforming all state-of-the-art open-source methods.

AI systems increasingly retrieve from records that revise themselves: issue threads, encyclopedic histories, policy logs, and long conversations. The challenge is not only finding relevant evidence, but deciding which claims remain in force, which were superseded, and when to abstain. Structured memories promise to solve this with typed edges, temporal updates, and conflict status, yet evaluations often change mechanism and prompt presentation together. We study this as Evidence-State Revision, comparing flat retrieval, coarse edge invalidation, and fine-grained RevisionLedger on 2,907 high-agreement questions from GitHub, multi-repo issue histories, Wikipedia, and DyKnow-style temporal streams. A render-matched control (same layout, deprecation disabled) reveals the central confound: when a value is changed and later restored, RevisionLedger appears to beat a flat baseline by +0.182, but almost all the gain comes from easier presentation; the fine-grained mechanism residual is indistinguishable from zero (+0.021 to +0.025 across two judge families). After presentation is controlled, coarse invalidation is the only mechanism that pays for current-state queries, beating the fine ledger by 0.084; the same query-sufficiency principle says provenance mainly needs retained invalidated evidence, not richer typing. Memory evaluations should hold render fixed, and deprecation-aware systems should deploy the coarsest retained state that covers their queries.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined frontend interface creation through tools like Vercel's V0, yet surfaced challenges in design quality (e.g., accessibility, and usability). Current solutions, often limited by their focus, generalisability, or data dependency, fall short in addressing these complexities. Moreover, none of them examine the quality of LLM-generated UI design. In this work, we introduce DesignRepair, a novel dual-stream design guideline-aware system to examine and repair the UI design quality issues from both code aspect and rendered page aspect. We utilised the mature and popular Material Design as our knowledge base to guide this process. Specifically, we first constructed a comprehensive knowledge base encoding Google's Material Design principles into low-level component knowledge base and high-level system design knowledge base. After that, DesignRepair employs a LLM for the extraction of key components and utilizes the Playwright tool for precise page analysis, aligning these with the established knowledge bases. Finally, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation with state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 to holistically refine and repair frontend code through a strategic divide and conquer approach. Our extensive evaluations validated the efficacy and utility of our approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in adherence to design guidelines, accessibility, and user experience metrics.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer numerous applications, the full extent of which is not yet understood. This paper investigates if LLMs can be applied for editing structured and semi-structured documents with minimal effort. Using a qualitative research approach, we conduct two case studies with ChatGPT and thoroughly analyze the results. Our experiments indicate that LLMs can effectively edit structured and semi-structured documents when provided with basic, straightforward prompts. ChatGPT demonstrates a strong ability to recognize and process the structure of annotated documents. This suggests that explicitly structuring tasks and data in prompts might enhance an LLM's ability to understand and solve tasks. Furthermore, the experiments also reveal impressive pattern matching skills in ChatGPT. This observation deserves further investigation, as it may contribute to understanding the processes leading to hallucinations in LLMs.

Failure-inducing inputs play a crucial role in diagnosing and analyzing software bugs. Bug reports typically contain these inputs, which developers extract to facilitate debugging. Since bug reports are written in natural language, prior research has leveraged various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for automated input extraction. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), an important research question arises: how effectively can generative LLMs extract failure-inducing inputs from bug reports? In this paper, we propose LLPut, a technique to empirically evaluate the performance of three open-source generative LLMs -- LLaMA, Qwen, and Qwen-Coder -- in extracting relevant inputs from bug reports. We conduct an experimental evaluation on a dataset of 206 bug reports to assess the accuracy and effectiveness of these models. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities and limitations of generative LLMs in automated bug diagnosis.

During Automated Program Repair (APR), it can be challenging to synthesize correct patches for real-world systems in general-purpose programming languages. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be helpful "copilots" in assisting developers with various coding tasks, and have also been directly applied for patch synthesis. However, most LLMs treat programs as sequences of tokens, meaning that they are ignorant of the underlying semantics constraints of the target programming language. This results in plenty of statically invalid generated patches, impeding the practicality of the technique. Therefore, we propose Repilot, a framework to further copilot the AI "copilots" (i.e., LLMs) by synthesizing more valid patches during the repair process. Our key insight is that many LLMs produce outputs autoregressively (i.e., token by token), resembling human writing programs, which can be significantly boosted and guided through a Completion Engine. Repilot synergistically synthesizes a candidate patch through the interaction between an LLM and a Completion Engine, which 1) prunes away infeasible tokens suggested by the LLM and 2) proactively completes the token based on the suggestions provided by the Completion Engine. Our evaluation on a subset of the widely-used Defects4j 1.2 and 2.0 datasets shows that Repilot fixes 66 and 50 bugs, respectively, surpassing the best-performing baseline by 14 and 16 bugs fixed. More importantly, Repilot is capable of producing more valid and correct patches than the base LLM when given the same generation budget.

Construction accident narratives contain rich causal information, but the evidence is often implicit, long-span, and distributed. We introduce ConstructCIE, a manually annotated dataset for Causal Information Extraction from OSHA construction accident reports. The dataset uses a hierarchical schema for accident types, causal factors, sub-causal factors, and supporting evidence spans. We evaluate supervised sequence taggers and instruction-tuned LLMs in an end-to-end hierarchical extraction setting. Results show that most evaluated models achieve strong accident-type prediction and recover broad causal meaning but remain limited in precise span-level extraction. JHE generally achieves stronger exact and soft matching, while IHE sometimes achieves higher keyword F1. Error distributions vary by extraction strategy, but evidence-selection and span-boundary errors remain common. These findings show that reliable Causal Information Extraction for construction accidents requires stronger domain grounding and more accurate evidence extraction.

Automatic program repair (APR) is crucial to improve software reliability. Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) techniques have been used to fix software bugs automatically. While promising, these approaches have two major limitations. Their search space often does not contain the correct fix, and their search strategy ignores software knowledge such as strict code syntax. Due to these limitations, existing NMT-based techniques underperform the best template-based approaches. We propose CURE, a new NMT-based APR technique with three major novelties. First, CURE pre-trains a programming language (PL) model on a large software codebase to learn developer-like source code before the APR task. Second, CURE designs a new code-aware search strategy that finds more correct fixes by focusing on compilable patches and patches that are close in length to the buggy code. Finally, CURE uses a subword tokenization technique to generate a smaller search space that contains more correct fixes. Our evaluation on two widely-used benchmarks shows that CURE correctly fixes 57 Defects4J bugs and 26 QuixBugs bugs, outperforming all existing APR techniques on both benchmarks.

Medical vision-language models can automate the generation of radiology reports but struggle with accurate visual grounding and factual consistency. Existing models often misalign textual findings with visual evidence, leading to unreliable or weakly grounded predictions. We present CURE, an error-aware curriculum learning framework that improves grounding and report quality without any additional data. CURE fine-tunes a multimodal instructional model on phrase grounding, grounded report generation, and anatomy-grounded report generation using public datasets. The method dynamically adjusts sampling based on model performance, emphasizing harder samples to improve spatial and textual alignment. CURE improves grounding accuracy by +0.37 IoU, boosts report quality by +0.188 CXRFEScore, and reduces hallucinations by 18.6%. CURE is a data-efficient framework that enhances both grounding accuracy and report reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/PabloMessina/CURE and model weights at https://huggingface.co/pamessina/medgemma-4b-it-cure

Automated Program Repair (APR) improves software reliability by generating patches for a buggy program automatically. Recent APR techniques leverage deep learning (DL) to build models to learn to generate patches from existing patches and code corpora. While promising, DL-based APR techniques suffer from the abundant syntactically or semantically incorrect patches in the patch space. These patches often disobey the syntactic and semantic domain knowledge of source code and thus cannot be the correct patches to fix a bug. We propose a DL-based APR approach KNOD, which incorporates domain knowledge to guide patch generation in a direct and comprehensive way. KNOD has two major novelties, including (1) a novel three-stage tree decoder, which directly generates Abstract Syntax Trees of patched code according to the inherent tree structure, and (2) a novel domain-rule distillation, which leverages syntactic and semantic rules and teacher-student distributions to explicitly inject the domain knowledge into the decoding procedure during both the training and inference phases. We evaluate KNOD on three widely-used benchmarks. KNOD fixes 72 bugs on the Defects4J v1.2, 25 bugs on the QuixBugs, and 50 bugs on the additional Defects4J v2.0 benchmarks, outperforming all existing APR tools.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been gaining increasing attention and demonstrated promising performance across a variety of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, such as Automated Program Repair (APR), code summarization, and code completion. For example, ChatGPT, the latest black-box LLM, has been investigated by numerous recent research studies and has shown impressive performance in various tasks. However, there exists a potential risk of data leakage since these LLMs are usually close-sourced with unknown specific training details, e.g., pre-training datasets. In this paper, we seek to review the bug-fixing capabilities of ChatGPT on a clean APR benchmark with different research objectives. We first introduce {\benchmark}, a new benchmark with buggy and the corresponding fixed programs from competitive programming problems starting from 2023, after the training cutoff point of ChatGPT. The results on {\benchmark} show that ChatGPT is able to fix 109 out of 151 buggy programs using the basic prompt within 35 independent rounds, outperforming state-of-the-art LLMs CodeT5 and PLBART by 27.5\% and 62.4\% prediction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of three types of prompts, i.e., problem description, error feedback, and bug localization, leading to additional 34 fixed bugs. Besides, we provide additional discussion from the interactive nature of ChatGPT to illustrate the capacity of a dialog-based repair workflow with 9 additional fixed bugs. Inspired by the findings, we further pinpoint various challenges and opportunities for advanced SE study equipped with such LLMs (e.g.,~ChatGPT) in the near future. More importantly, our work calls for more research on the reevaluation of the achievements obtained by existing black-box LLMs across various SE tasks, not limited to ChatGPT on APR.

Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors. Our insight is that development-set failures can recover part of the missing diagnostic substrate by deciding which recovery interventions are admissible before test-time correction. We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment. This causal order makes correction selective: the harness first determines what kind of failure can be repaired, then decides how much recovery evidence to spend. In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget. Our experiments show that failures need not trigger uniformly more context: DARC turns self-correction from prompt expansion into recovery-interface design. DARC provides a practical route toward more reliable agents in domains where compiler-like feedback is absent: making failures actionable before making contexts larger.

Users increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Deep Research, using them to synthesize diverse sources into structured reports that support understanding and action. In this context, the practical reliability of such reports hinges on logical quality: whether the report's claims and arguments are explicitly supported and can be trusted as a basis for downstream use, rather than merely appearing fluent or informative. However, current evaluation frameworks largely overlook this requirement. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReportLogic, a benchmark that quantifies report-level logical quality through a reader-centric lens of auditability. Specifically, ReportLogic adopts a hierarchical taxonomy that evaluates whether readers can (1) trace an on-topic report structure with a unified analytical arc (Macro-Logic), (2) understand the progression with necessary context (Expositional-Logic), and (3) verify conclusions via explicit claim--support (Structural-Logic). Based on this taxonomy, we construct a human-annotated rubric-guided dataset and train an open-source LogicJudge for scalable evaluation. We further evaluate judge robustness via adversarial attacks, showing that off-the-shelf LLM judges are frequently influenced by superficial cues (e.g., verbosity), and reasoning modes can mask broken support relations. Overall, our results provide actionable guidance for building more robust logic evaluators and improving the logical reliability of LLM-generated reports.

Constructing scientific multimodal document reasoning datasets for foundation model training involves an inherent trade-off among scale, faithfulness, and realism. To address this challenge, we introduce the synthesize-and-reground framework, a two-stage pipeline comprising: (1) Claim-Centric QA Synthesis, which generates faithful, isolated QA pairs and reasoning on focused segments, and (2) Document-Scale Regrounding, which programmatically re-embeds these pairs into full-document tasks to ensure realistic complexity. Using this framework, we construct SciMDR, a large-scale training dataset for cross-modal comprehension, comprising 300K QA pairs with explicit reasoning chains across 20K scientific papers. We further construct SciMDR-Eval, an expert-annotated benchmark to evaluate multimodal comprehension within full-length scientific workflows. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on SciMDR achieve significant improvements across multiple scientific QA benchmarks, particularly in those tasks requiring complex document-level reasoning.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs automatically and plays a crucial role in software development and maintenance. With the recent advances in deep learning (DL), an increasing number of APR techniques have been proposed to leverage neural networks to learn bug-fixing patterns from massive open-source code repositories. Such learning-based techniques usually treat APR as a neural machine translation (NMT) task, where buggy code snippets (i.e., source language) are translated into fixed code snippets (i.e., target language) automatically. Benefiting from the powerful capability of DL to learn hidden relationships from previous bug-fixing datasets, learning-based APR techniques have achieved remarkable performance. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the learning-based APR community. We illustrate the general workflow of learning-based APR techniques and detail the crucial components, including fault localization, patch generation, patch ranking, patch validation, and patch correctness phases. We then discuss the widely-adopted datasets and evaluation metrics and outline existing empirical studies. We discuss several critical aspects of learning-based APR techniques, such as repair domains, industrial deployment, and the open science issue. We highlight several practical guidelines on applying DL techniques for future APR studies, such as exploring explainable patch generation and utilizing code features. Overall, our paper can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the achievements of the existing learning-based APR techniques and promote the practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/QuanjunZhang/AwesomeLearningAPR.

Identifying the intent of a citation in scientific papers (e.g., background information, use of methods, comparing results) is critical for machine reading of individual publications and automated analysis of the scientific literature. We propose structural scaffolds, a multitask model to incorporate structural information of scientific papers into citations for effective classification of citation intents. Our model achieves a new state-of-the-art on an existing ACL anthology dataset (ACL-ARC) with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score, without relying on external linguistic resources or hand-engineered features as done in existing methods. In addition, we introduce a new dataset of citation intents (SciCite) which is more than five times larger and covers multiple scientific domains compared with existing datasets. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/scicite.

Patch retrieval, the task of finding the commit that fixes a known vulnerability, is the foundation of vulnerability management workflows, yet 60% to 63% of CVEs in the major advisory databases lack a patch link. We present PatchHolmes, a two-phase patch retrieval system that pairs a hybrid first-stage retriever with an agentic second-stage inspection loop. Unlike pointwise prior work that scores each candidate independently, the Phase 2 agent reads the top-100 listwise: it sees the full candidate list at once and selectively reads 3 to 10 commits through four budgeted tools before submitting a single best commit. On GitHubAD, PatchHolmes beats the pointwise binary classifier Favia by 25.34% Recall@1 and the retrieve-and-CoT baseline IRCoT by 31.40%, at one agent conversation per CVE versus Favia's ten; with the candidate set held identical, the agent adds 27.32% Recall@1 over taking the retriever's top candidate, and the same agent, transferred unchanged to PatchFinder_top10, lifts Recall@1 from PatchFinder's own top-1 pick (24.28%) to 39.86%. Swapping the LLM backbone within the Qwen family changes Recall@1 by under 1%, and a second model family (gpt-oss) stays far above the no-agent floor, so the gain comes from the listwise agent loop; the entire system runs on a frozen open-weight model over a local Git repository, without fine-tuning or external search APIs.

Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history. We show that an event-sourced agent runtime removes that friction and turns controlled improvement into a first-class workflow. When the agent's state is a deterministic projection of an append-only event log, failures are recorded, a run replays exactly from its log, candidate patches scope to typed pipeline seams, gates are auditable, and every promotion or discard is itself an event. We demonstrate this with Regimes, a loop on the ActiveGraph runtime that diagnoses failed evaluations, proposes a repair at a pipeline point, and promotes it only after static checks, sandbox execution, in-sample evaluation, and held-out validation. The loop is target-agnostic: the same control flow runs against different tasks through a common interface. On LongMemEval-S the dominant failure is not retrieval but reconciliation: the evidence is already in the assembled context, yet the reader answers incorrectly. Across five seeded held-out splits, Regimes discovers reader-prompt repairs that improve final held-out accuracy by +0.05 to +0.10 in four splits and +0.01 in one over-promotion split; two splits are individually significant (seed 5 unadjusted for its sequential promotion structure), and the pooled count is descriptive only, since the splits share one 500-question pool. The durable contributions are ActiveGraph as an auditable substrate that makes controlled improvement loops tractable, the held-out-gated loop it supports, the failure-regime taxonomy routing each failure to a pipeline location (whose marginal value over an unrouted baseline is the primary open question), and the prompt-as-discovery-probe hypothesis.

Autonomous research systems increasingly make the scientific workflow executable: agents can propose ideas, run code, inspect results, and draft papers. But executable workflows do not by themselves produce research judgment. We analyze where current systems lose trial experience: weak evidence becomes prose, pilot signals become broad claims, memory remains textual, and recurring process failures do not change later behavior. We introduce Sibyl-AutoResearch, a self-evolving AutoResearch framework built around Scientific Trial-and-Error Harnesses. A harness lets agents run bounded trials, preserve positive and negative outcomes, and route lessons into later planning, validation, claim scope, scheduling, critique, writing, and harness repair. We formalize this through two auditable conversion units: trial-to-behavior conversion, which links trial signals to later research actions, and trial-to-harness-behavior conversion, which links recurring process failures to system updates. We implement the framework in SIBYL, a file-backed autonomous research system that exposes the state, roles, memory, gates, and artifact traces needed to inspect these conversion paths. A retrospective audit identifies eight high-confidence conversion events, with a median latency of one iteration and a maximum latency of three iterations. A recovered-failure registry further shows how five naturally occurring failure classes, including duplicate results, stale numbers, and unsupported statistics, were blocked, downgraded, or routed into later repair. These traces do not establish a comparative performance claim; they show that the proposed conversion units are recoverable from realistic autonomous-research workspaces. The SIBYL framework and system are available at https://github.com/Sibyl-Research-Team/AutoResearch-SibylSystem.

Structured outputs are essential for large language models (LLMs) in critical applications like agents and information extraction. Despite their capabilities, LLMs often generate outputs that deviate from predefined schemas, significantly hampering reliable application development. We present SLOT (Structured LLM Output Transformer), a model-agnostic approach that transforms unstructured LLM outputs into precise structured formats. While existing solutions predominantly rely on constrained decoding techniques or are tightly coupled with specific models, SLOT employs a fine-tuned lightweight language model as a post-processing layer, achieving flexibility across various LLMs and schema specifications. We introduce a systematic pipeline for data curation and synthesis alongside a formal evaluation methodology that quantifies both schema accuracy and content fidelity. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuned Mistral-7B model with constrained decoding achieves near perfect schema accuracy (99.5%) and content similarity (94.0%), outperforming Claude-3.5-Sonnet by substantial margins (+25 and +20 percentage points, respectively). Notably, even compact models like Llama-3.2-1B can match or exceed the structured output capabilities of much larger proprietary models when equipped with SLOT, enabling reliable structured generation in resource-constrained environments.

Efficient bug resolution is critical for maintaining software quality and user satisfaction. However, specific bug reports experience unusually long resolution times, which may indicate underlying process inefficiencies or complex issues. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of bug resolution anomalies across seven prominent open-source repositories: Cassandra, Firefox, Hadoop, HBase, SeaMonkey, Spark, and Thunderbird. Utilizing statistical methods such as Z-score and Interquartile Range (IQR), we identify anomalies in bug resolution durations. To understand the thematic nature of these anomalies, we apply Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) for textual feature extraction and KMeans clustering to group similar bug summaries. Our findings reveal consistent patterns across projects, with anomalies often clustering around test failures, enhancement requests, and user interface issues. This approach provides actionable insights for project maintainers to prioritize and effectively address long-standing bugs.

Large language model (LLM) agents frequently fail on multi-step tasks involving reasoning, tool use, and environment interaction. While such failures are typically logged or retried heuristically, they contain structured signals about where execution broke down. We introduce CausalFlow, an interventional framework that converts failed agent traces into minimal counterfactual repairs and reusable supervision. CausalFlow models execution traces as sequential chains of dependent steps and computes Causal Responsibility Scores(CRS) via step-level counterfactual intervention to identify failure-inducing steps. For these steps, we generate minimally edited repairs that flip the final outcome to success, producing validated contrastive pairs of the form (wrong step, corrected step). CausalFlow supports two complementary uses: targeted test-time repair that recovers from failures with minimal behavioral drift, and training-time supervision suitable for offline preference optimization or reward modeling. Across four benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, question answering, and medical browsing, CausalFlow converts failed executions into validated minimal repairs with high minimality and causal-consensus scores, and demonstrates that causal attribution is necessary for reliable improvement across diverse agent tasks, outperforming heuristic refinement in complex retrieval settings while producing more localized repairs throughout. These results demonstrate that interventional analysis over structured execution traces provides a principled and scalable mechanism for transforming agent failures into reliability gains and learning-ready supervision.

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data.

We propose patching for large language models (LLMs) like software versions, a lightweight and modular approach for addressing safety vulnerabilities. While vendors release improved LLM versions, major releases are costly, infrequent, and difficult to tailor to customer needs, leaving released models with known safety gaps. Unlike full-model fine-tuning or major version updates, our method enables rapid remediation by prepending a compact, learnable prefix to an existing model. This "patch" introduces only 0.003% additional parameters, yet reliably steers model behavior toward that of a safer reference model. Across three critical domains (toxicity mitigation, bias reduction, and harmfulness refusal) policy patches achieve safety improvements comparable to next-generation safety-aligned models while preserving fluency. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can be "patched" much like software, offering vendors and practitioners a practical mechanism for distributing scalable, efficient, and composable safety updates between major model releases.

Reproducibility is central to research credibility, yet large-scale reanalysis of empricial data remains costly because replication packages vary widely in structure, software environment, and documentation. We develop and evaluate an agentic AI workflow that addresses this execution bottleneck while preserving scientific rigor. The system separates scientific reasoning from computational execution: researchers design fixed diagnostic templates, and the workflow automates the acquisition, harmonization, and execution of replication materials using pre-specified, version-controlled code. A structured knowledge layer records resolved failure patterns, enabling adaptation across heterogeneous studies while keeping each pipeline version transparent and stable. We evaluate this workflow on 92 instrumental variable (IV) studies, including 67 with manually verified reproducible 2SLS estimates and 25 newly published IV studies under identical criteria. For each paper, we analyze up to three two-stage least squares (2SLS) specifications, totaling 215. Across the 92 papers, the system achieves 87% end-to-end success overall. Conditional on accessible data and code, reproducibility is 100% at both the paper and specification levels. The framework substantially lowers the cost of executing established empirical protocols and can be adapted in empirical settings where analytic templates and norms of transparency are well established.

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) generate citation-rich reports via multi-step search and synthesis, yet existing benchmarks mainly target text-only settings or short-form multimodal QA, missing end-to-end multimodal evidence use. We introduce MMDeepResearch-Bench (MMDR-Bench), a benchmark of 140 expert-crafted tasks across 21 domains, where each task provides an image-text bundle to evaluate multimodal understanding and citation-grounded report generation. Compared to prior setups, MMDR-Bench emphasizes report-style synthesis with explicit evidence use, where models must connect visual artifacts to sourced claims and maintain consistency across narrative, citations, and visual references. We further propose a unified, interpretable evaluation pipeline: Formula-LLM Adaptive Evaluation (FLAE) for report quality, Trustworthy Retrieval-Aligned Citation Evaluation (TRACE) for citation-grounded evidence alignment, and Multimodal Support-Aligned Integrity Check (MOSAIC) for text-visual integrity, each producing fine-grained signals that support error diagnosis beyond a single overall score. Experiments across 25 state-of-the-art models reveal systematic trade-offs between generation quality, citation discipline, and multimodal grounding, highlighting that strong prose alone does not guarantee faithful evidence use and that multimodal integrity remains a key bottleneck for deep research agents.

Modern Deep Learning (DL) architectures based on transformers (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) are exhibiting performance improvements across a number of natural language tasks. While such DL models have shown tremendous potential for use in software engineering applications, they are often hampered by insufficient training data. Particularly constrained are applications that require project-specific data, such as bug localization, which aims at recommending code to fix a newly submitted bug report. Deep learning models for bug localization require a substantial training set of fixed bug reports, which are at a limited quantity even in popular and actively developed software projects. In this paper, we examine the effect of using synthetic training data on transformer-based DL models that perform a more complex variant of bug localization, which has the goal of retrieving bug-inducing changesets for each bug report. To generate high-quality synthetic data, we propose novel data augmentation operators that act on different constituent components of bug reports. We also describe a data balancing strategy that aims to create a corpus of augmented bug reports that better reflects the entire source code base, because existing bug reports used as training data usually reference a small part of the code base.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to help developers improve software reliability by generating patches for buggy programs. Although many code language models (CLM) are developed and effective in many software tasks such as code completion, there has been little comprehensive, in-depth work to evaluate CLMs' fixing capabilities and to fine-tune CLMs for the APR task. Firstly, this work is the first to evaluate ten CLMs on four APR benchmarks, which shows that surprisingly, the best CLM, as is, fixes 72% more bugs than the state-of-the-art deep-learning (DL)-based APR techniques. Secondly, one of the four APR benchmarks was created by us in this paper to avoid data leaking for a fair evaluation. Thirdly, it is the first work to fine-tune CLMs with APR training data, which shows that fine-tuning brings 31%-1,267% improvement to CLMs and enables them to fix 46%-164% more bugs than existing DL-based APR techniques. Fourthly, this work studies the impact of buggy lines, showing that CLMs, as is, cannot make good use of the buggy lines to fix bugs, yet fine-tuned CLMs could potentially over-rely on buggy lines. Lastly, this work analyzes the size, time, and memory efficiency of different CLMs. This work shows promising directions for the APR domain, such as fine-tuning CLMs with APR-specific designs, and also raises awareness of fair and comprehensive evaluations of CLMs and calls for more transparent reporting of open-source repositories used in the pre-training data to address the data leaking problem.

Multimodal agents are increasingly used for data visualization tasks but remain limited in autonomous review. Unlike humans, they may fail to recognize when a visualization is incorrect, determine what to change, repair it without disrupting correct content, and verify whether the intervention succeeded. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate predefined individual capabilities such as chart generation, instruction-guided editing, or defect detection, and therefore do not capture this gap in autonomous review. We introduce VisAudit, a benchmark for evaluating visualization diagnosis, repair, and verification. Given a rendered chart and configurable auxiliary evidence, including its source data table, intended text summary, and visualization code, an agent iteratively diagnoses potential defects, modifies and executes visualization code, inspects execution and visual feedback, and determines when no further intervention is needed. VisAudit defines three tracks spanning diagnosed repair, autonomous repair, and open-world verification, and contains 1,900 flawed instances across 21 chart types and 10 flaw categories, together with 300 initially correct charts. We construct the benchmark through controlled perturbations of validated source visualizations, with systematic verification and human-aligned quality control to ensure that injected defects are well-defined and recoverable from the available evidence. Experiments with leading multimodal models reveal a substantial gap from reliable autonomous review: the strongest evaluated model fully recovers only 47.4% of flawed charts in the autonomous-repair setting.

LLM-based code agents treat repositories as unstructured text, applying edits through brittle string matching that frequently fails due to formatting drift or ambiguous patterns. We propose reframing the codebase as a structured action space where agents operate on named AST entities rather than text spans. Our framework, CODESTRUCT, provides readCode for retrieving complete syntactic units and editCode for applying syntax-validated transformations to semantic program elements. Evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified across six LLMs, CODESTRUCT improves Pass@1 accuracy by 1.2-5.0% while reducing token consumption by 12-38% for most models. Models that frequently fail to produce valid patches under text-based interfaces benefit most: GPT-5-nano improves by 20.8% as empty-patch failures drop from 46.6% to 7.2%. On CodeAssistBench, we observe consistent accuracy gains (+0.8-4.4%) with cost reductions up to 33%. Our results show that structure-aware interfaces offer a more reliable foundation for code agents.

LLM-based coding agents have significantly advanced automated software issue resolution, yet they remain highly prone to factual errors caused by insufficient repository understanding. Recent methods attempt to mitigate this limitation through pre-repair repository exploration; however, their fix-driven strategies explore repositories without identifying the agent's knowledge gaps, often yielding imprecise context that fails to bridge the underlying understanding deficit. In this paper, we propose ACQUIRE, a QA-driven framework for software issue resolution. Mirroring how experienced developers first comprehend unfamiliar code before attempting a fix, ACQUIRE explicitly acquires repository knowledge prior to repair. The framework decouples knowledge acquisition from patch generation through two stages: in the first stage, a Questioner and an Answerer collaborate to acquire structured repository knowledge, where the Questioner poses targeted questions and the Answerer produces evidence-grounded answers through autonomous exploration; in the second stage, the Resolver leverages the resulting QA knowledge to generate informed patches. By transforming implicit knowledge gaps into explicit, factually reliable understanding, ACQUIRE accelerates knowledge-intensive repair stages and enables more accurate resolution. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate that ACQUIRE consistently outperforms representative pre-repair methods, raising Pass@1 by up to 4.4 percentage points with modest additional cost and time.