SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?
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Abstract (arXiv)
AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments. Yet current agent benchmarks largely evaluate short-form tasks, such as single pull requests, small tickets, or 5-10 minute exercises, limiting our ability to measure agents' capabilities in planning, long-context understanding, and memory use. We introduce SWE-Marathon, a benchmark of 20 long-horizon tasks spanning software engineering and adjacent technical domains. Each task consists of a unique executable environment, a human-written reference solution, and a multi-layer verification suite. Logged agent attempts average 27.2M total tokens, making SWE-Marathon substantially longer-horizon than existing SWE and command-line agent benchmarks. Current frontier coding agents solve fewer than 30% of tasks. Failures often arise from poor self-verification, self-reported infeasibility, and premature termination. We also observe reward-hacking behavior in 13.8% of rollouts, where agents attempt to exploit the environment or verifier to bypass the intended workflow. SWE-Marathon includes adversarial review of test suites and execution environments, as well as multi-layer checks designed to prevent shortcut solutions. We release SWE-Marathon, evaluation code, and agent trajectories at https://swe-marathon.org/.
Key facts. Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 27 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2026.
Builds on
27 of 73 references.
References · 27
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
- 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineeringcited by 429
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- 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
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- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 255
- 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
- 2025Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolvingcited by 165
- 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 156
- 2024RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human expertscited by 153
- 2024CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmarkcited by 115
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- 2026Learning to Discover at Test Timecited by 94
- 2021TOGA: A Neural Method for Test Oracle Generationcited by 57
- 2024SUPER: Evaluating Agents on Setting Up and Executing Tasks from Research Repositoriescited by 52
- 2025CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoringcited by 49
- 2025SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarioscited by 49
- 2026Reward Hacking in the Era of Large Models: Mechanisms, Emergent Misalignment, Challengescited by 30
- 2026Reward Hacking Benchmark: Measuring Exploits in LLM Agents with Tool Usecited by 25
- 2026SpecBench: Measuring Reward Hacking in Long-Horizon Coding Agentscited by 25
- 2026LLMs Gaming Verifiers: RLVR can Lead to Reward Hackingcited by 24
- 2026Benchmarking Reward Hack Detection in Code Environments via Contrastive Analysiscited by 15
- 2026Countdown-Code: A Testbed for Studying The Emergence and Generalization of Reward Hacking in RLVRcited by 15
- 2026Terminal Wrench: A Dataset of 331 Reward-Hackable Environments and 3,632 Exploit Trajectoriescited by 14
- 2026Hack-Verifiable Environments: Towards Evaluating Reward Hacking at Scalecited by 9
- 2026Towards Understanding Specification Gaming in Reasoning Modelscited by 3
- 2019Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 1
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 19.
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- 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Gradingcited by 20
- 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Taskscited by 8
- 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoringcited by 5
- 2026MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alonecited by 4
- 2026BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology taskscited by 1
- 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecyclecited by 1
- 2026SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agentscited by 1
- 2026Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performancecited by 0
- 2026BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requestscited by 0
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- 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?cited by 0
- 2026Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligencecited by 0
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- 2026Cross-Benchmark Transfer from RL on Agentic Coding Taskscited by 0
- 2026LiveMACE: Process-Aware Evaluation of LLM Agent Capabilities in Evolving Marketscited by 0
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interactioncited by 0
- 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interaction8 Oct 2026
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolution7 Oct 2026
- 2026LiveMACE: Process-Aware Evaluation of LLM Agent Capabilities in Evolving Markets7 Oct 2026
- 2026Cross-Benchmark Transfer from RL on Agentic Coding Tasks1 Oct 2026
- 2026Incident-Arena: Getting agents to the last nine of reliability30 Sep 2026
- 2026StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligence28 Sep 2026
- 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?27 Sep 2026
- 2026TomasuLLM: Out-of-Order Speculative Execution for LLM Agents22 Sep 2026
- 2026SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle4 Sep 2026
- 2026BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology tasks26 Aug 2026
7 more
- 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoring10 Aug 2026
- 2026Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Traces5 Aug 2026
- 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks5 Aug 2026
- 2026BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requests3 Aug 2026
- 2026Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performance29 Jul 2026
- 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Grading9 Jul 2026
- 2026MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alone29 Jun 2026
- 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoringcited by 5
- 2026BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology taskscited by 1
- 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecyclecited by 1
- 2026SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agentscited by 1
- 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?cited by 0
- 2026StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agentscited by 0
- 2026TomasuLLM: Out-of-Order Speculative Execution for LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Incident-Arena: Getting agents to the last nine of reliabilitycited by 0
- 2026Cross-Benchmark Transfer from RL on Agentic Coding Taskscited by 0
- 2026LiveMACE: Process-Aware Evaluation of LLM Agent Capabilities in Evolving Marketscited by 0
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolution7 Oct 2026
- 2026LiveMACE: Process-Aware Evaluation of LLM Agent Capabilities in Evolving Markets7 Oct 2026
- 2026Cross-Benchmark Transfer from RL on Agentic Coding Tasks1 Oct 2026
- 2026Incident-Arena: Getting agents to the last nine of reliability30 Sep 2026
- 2026StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?27 Sep 2026
- 2026TomasuLLM: Out-of-Order Speculative Execution for LLM Agents22 Sep 2026
- 2026SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle4 Sep 2026
- 2026BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology tasks26 Aug 2026
- 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoring10 Aug 2026
- 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Gradingcited by 20
- 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Taskscited by 8
- 2026MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alonecited by 4
- 2026Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performancecited by 0
- 2026BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requestscited by 0
- 2026Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Tracescited by 0
- 2026Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interactioncited by 0
- 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interaction8 Oct 2026
- 2026Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligence28 Sep 2026
- 2026Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Traces5 Aug 2026
- 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks5 Aug 2026
- 2026BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requests3 Aug 2026
- 2026Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performance29 Jul 2026
- 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Grading9 Jul 2026
- 2026MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alone29 Jun 2026
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