# Agent-Based Software Artifact Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02235/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 22 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15817/) (2023)
- [CodeAgent: Enhancing Code Generation with Tool-Integrated Agent Systems for Real-World Repo-level Coding Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07339/) (2024)
- [AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05427/) (2024)
- [Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10934/) (2024)
- [RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17134/) (2024)
- [Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21506/) (2025)
- [You Name It, I Run It: An LLM Agent to Execute Tests of Arbitrary Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10133/) (2024)
- [Reproducibility in Machine Learning-based Research: Overview, Barriers and Drivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14325/) (2024)
- [Rubric Is All You Need: Enhancing LLM-based Code Evaluation With Question-Specific Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23989/) (2025)
- [Reflections on the Reproducibility of Commercial LLM Performance in Empirical Software Engineering Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25506/) (2025)
- [CXXCrafter: An LLM-Based Agent for Automated C/C++ Open Source Software Building](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21069/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Reproducibility Crisis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00651/) (2025)
- [The Hidden Structure -- Improving Legal Document Understanding Through Explicit Text Formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12837/) (2025)
- [Understanding and Improving Artifact Sharing in Software Engineering Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01046/) (2020)
- [The State of Open Science in Software Engineering Research: A Case Study of ICSE Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02066/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Artifact Evaluation for Software Engineering in the Age of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artifact Evaluation (AE) has become a standard mechanism for linking software engineering papers to their supporting artifacts, but growing submission volume makes purely manual AE increasingly difficult to sustain. Although recent advances in LLM-based agents make AE automation increasingly plausible, current descriptive badge policies define badge semantics but provide no executable verification criteria, leaving both human reviewers and agents without a detailed basis for judgment. To address this gap, we construct ArtifactGuide, a structured scoring rubric grounded in ACM policy, expert-informed calibration, and artifact-based validation, and we design ArtifactCopilot, an agent collecting review evidence following a fixed sequence under ArtifactGuide and deriving the final badge decision from accumulated evidence. We evaluate our framework on 60 real artifacts from recent software engineering conferences using human-adjudicated badges as reference. The results show that ArtifactGuide improves the AE performance of coding agents over official ACM badge-policy prompts, increasing three-run mean exact badge agreement by 10.55 to 28.34 percentage points. Across all evaluated systems and prompting protocols, ArtifactCopilot achieves the highest badge-level agreement at 70.56% and is the only system that completed all repeated runs successfully while producing a review report in every run. A controlled user study with 8 experienced researchers suggests that ArtifactCopilot reports improve reviewer confidence, help reviewers locate evidence, and understand evaluation scope more clearly. Further analysis translates insights from automated AE into practical guidance for designing higher-quality artifacts with clearer review routes, more explicit claim-to-output links, and more concrete reuse paths.