mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SWE-Cycle: Benchmarking Code Agents across the Complete Issue Resolution Cycle

arXiv 2605.13139 ↗First posted 13 May 2026cs.SEcited by 5

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As autonomous code agents move toward end-to-end software development, evaluating their practical autonomy becomes critical. Current benchmarks hide friction by testing agents in pre-configured environments, and their static evaluation pipelines frequently fail when parsing fully autonomous trajectories. We address these limitations with SWE-Cycle, a benchmark of 489 rigorously filtered instances. SWE-Cycle evaluates agents across three isolated tasks, including environment reconstruction, code implementation, and verification test generation, as well as an end-to-end FullCycle task that integrates all three. The FullCycle task requires agents to work autonomously in a bare repository without human scaffolding. To reliably assess these complex execution paths, we developed SWE-Judge. By combining static code review with dynamic testing, this execution-capable evaluation agent accurately verifies functional correctness and eliminates the systematic measurement errors of traditional static parsers. We evaluate code agents powered by six state-of-the-art LLMs across these four tasks. The results reveal a sharp drop in solve rates when transitioning from isolated tasks to FullCycle execution, exposing critical bottlenecks in handling cross-phase dependencies and maintaining code quality. Together, SWE-Cycle and SWE-Judge provide a comprehensive framework for accurately measuring the end-to-end capabilities of autonomous software agents.

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 21 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

Builds on

21 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Code Review Agent Benchmark24 Mar
  2. 2026FeatureBench: Benchmarking Agentic Coding for Complex Feature Development11 Feb
  3. 2025NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents14 Dec
  4. 2025Benchmarking and Studying the LLM-based Agent System in End-to-End Software Development6 Nov
  5. 2025UTBoost: Rigorous Evaluation of Coding Agents on SWE-Bench10 Jun
  6. 2025Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?17 Mar
  7. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 14

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
  3. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
  4. 2024Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 269
  5. 2024Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agentscited by 238
  6. 2025Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolvingcited by 171
  7. 2025Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarkscited by 102
  8. 2025FEA-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Repository-Level Code Generation for Feature Implementationcited by 58
  9. 2025The SWE-Bench Illusion: When State-of-the-Art LLMs Remember Instead of Reasoncited by 49
  10. 2024TESTEVAL: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Test Case Generationcited by 40
  11. 2025EnvBench: A Benchmark for Automated Environment Setupcited by 36
  12. 2025CodeJudgeBench: Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Coding Taskscited by 33
2 more
  1. 2026DevBench: A Realistic, Developer-Informed Benchmark for Code Generation Modelscited by 8
  2. 2025AI-Augmented CI/CD Pipelines: From Code Commit to Production with Autonomous Decisionscited by 1

Built on by

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. 2026SWE Atlas: Benchmarking Coding Agents Beyond Issue Resolution
  2. 2026E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch
  3. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions
  4. 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoring
  5. 2026SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration
  6. 2025SWE-PolyBench: A multi-language benchmark for repository level evaluation of coding agents
  7. 2026SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?
  8. 2026SWE-Explore: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Explore Repositories