Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation

Computer Science > Software Engineering arXiv:2609.01603v1 (cs) [Submitted on 1 Sep 2026] Title:Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation Authors:Kefeng Duan, Dewu Zheng, Yanlin Wang, Xiwen Wang, Ensheng Shi, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma, Jiachi Chen, Mingwei Liu, Zibin Zheng View a PDF of the paper titled Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation, by Kefeng Duan and 9 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Evaluating software engineering agents on realistic benchmarks is costly, since each task may require multi-step code exploration, modification, and test execution. Existing efficient evaluation methods select representative subsets to estimate full-benchmark performance, but are largely result-only: they fit historical pass/fail response matrices or static task semantics, discarding how agents solve problems. We propose PTA-IRT, a Privileged Trajectory-Aware Item Response Theory framework that fuses process and outcome signals. Historical execution trajectories supply process-level evidence beyond pass/fail, such as explored context, attempted edits, and solving paths, which PTA-IRT uses as privileged information for calibration subset selection and ability estimation. Under low calibration budgets, PTA-IRT consistently outperforms prior IRT baselines on score and ranking recovery across four SWE benchmarks. Code and data are publicly available at this https URL. Comments: Subjects: Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2609.01603 [cs.SE] (or arXiv:2609.01603v1 [cs.SE] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01603 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Kefeng Duan [view email] [v1] Tue, 1 Sep 2026 17:59:46 UTC (482 KB) Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)