mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents

arXiv 2602.03219 ↗First posted 3 Feb 2026cs.AIcited by 5

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

As code large language models (LLMs) evolve into tool-interactive agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), their generalization is increasingly limited by low-quality synthetic data and the diminishing returns of quantity scaling. Moreover, quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data. We propose TDScaling, a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. Under a fixed training budget, increasing trajectory diversity yields larger gains than adding more trajectories, improving the performance-cost trade-off for agent training. TDScaling integrates four innovations: (1) a Business Cluster mechanism that captures real-service logical dependencies; (2) a blueprint-driven multi-agent paradigm that enforces trajectory coherence; (3) an adaptive evolution mechanism that steers synthesis toward long-tail scenarios using Domain Entropy, Reasoning Mode Entropy, and Cumulative Action Complexity to prevent mode collapse; and (4) a sandboxed code tool that mitigates catastrophic forgetting of intrinsic coding capabilities. Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks (BFCL, tau^2-Bench) and code agent tasks (RebenchT, CodeCI, BIRD) demonstrate a win-win outcome: TDScaling improves both tool-use generalization and inherent coding proficiency. We plan to release the full codebase and the synthesized dataset (including 30,000+ tool clusters) upon publication.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

Builds on

16 of 30 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents31 Jul
  2. 2025SWE-rebench: An Automated Pipeline for Task Collection and Decontaminated Evaluation of Software Engineering Agents26 May
  3. 2024CodeAgent: Enhancing Code Generation with Tool-Integrated Agent Systems for Real-World Repo-level Coding Challenges14 Jan

Other references · 13

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  3. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
  4. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,947
  5. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,332
  6. 2023Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLscited by 688
  7. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
  8. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 591
  9. 2025APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplaycited by 167
  10. 2023Self-Edit: Fault-Aware Code Editor for Code Generationcited by 111
  11. 2024AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flowscited by 89
  12. 2025Simulating Environments with Reasoning Models for Agent Trainingcited by 57
1 more
  1. 2024Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulationcited by 24

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025DARS: Dynamic Action Re-Sampling to Enhance Coding Agent Performance by Adaptive Tree Traversal
  2. 2026A Systematic Evaluation of Trajectory Data Curation for LoRA Fine-Tuning of Code Agents
  3. 2025Generalizable End-to-End Tool-Use RL with Synthetic CodeGym
  4. 2025Reducing Cost of LLM Agents with Trajectory Reduction
  5. 2025Multi-Mission Tool Bench: Assessing the Robustness of LLM based Agents through Related and Dynamic Missions
  6. 2026FormulaCode: Evaluating Agentic Optimization on Large Codebases
  7. 2024AgentBank: Towards Generalized LLM Agents via Fine-Tuning on 50000+ Interaction Trajectories
  8. 2025TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use