# SweRank+: Multilingual, Multi-Turn Code Ranking for Software Issue Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21798/) (2025)
- [RankT5: Fine-Tuning T5 for Text Ranking with Ranking Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10634/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00083/) (2025)
- [Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14122/) (2023)
- [LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09089/) (2025)
- [SWE-PolyBench: A multi-language benchmark for repository level evaluation of coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08703/) (2025)
- [OrcaLoca: An LLM Agent Framework for Software Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00350/) (2025)
- [SweRank: Software Issue Localization with Code Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07849/) (2025)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Bug Tracking in the Generative AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08005/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Scaling Coding Agents via Atomic Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05013/) (2026)
- [Agentic Software Issue Resolution with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22256/) (2025)
- [LARGER: Lexically Anchored Repository Graph Exploration and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16352/) (2026)
- [MM-IssueLoc: A Controlled Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Evidence in Multimodal Repository-Level Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15205/) (2026)
- [Small Agents with Semantic Search: Efficient Multilingual Code Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05099/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Maintaining large-scale, multilingual codebases hinges on accurately localizing issues, which requires mapping natural-language error descriptions to the relevant functions that need to be modified. However, existing ranking approaches are often Python-centric and perform a single-pass search over the codebase. This work introduces SweRank+, a framework that couples SweRankMulti, a cross-lingual code ranking tool, with SweRankAgent, an agentic search setup, for iterative, multi-turn reasoning over the code repository. SweRankMulti comprises a code embedding retriever and a listwise LLM reranker, and is trained using a carefully curated large-scale issue localization dataset spanning multiple popular programming languages. SweRankAgent adopts an agentic search loop that moves beyond single-shot localization with a memory buffer to reason and accumulate relevant localization candidates over multiple turns. Our experiments on issue localization benchmarks spanning various languages demonstrate new state-of-the-art performance with SweRankMulti, while SweRankAgent further improves localization over single-pass ranking.