mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?

arXiv 2606.07682 ↗First posted 5 Jun 2026cs.SE cs.AIcited by 19

Not on the map. Why?

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

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  2. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  3. 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineeringcited by 429
  4. 2025Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscationcited by 338
  5. 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
  6. 2025PaperBench: Evaluating AI's Ability to Replicate AI Researchcited by 286
  7. 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 255
  8. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
  9. 2025Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolvingcited by 165
  10. 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 156
  11. 2024RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human expertscited by 153
  12. 2024CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmarkcited by 115
15 more
  1. 2026Learning to Discover at Test Timecited by 94
  2. 2021TOGA: A Neural Method for Test Oracle Generationcited by 57
  3. 2024SUPER: Evaluating Agents on Setting Up and Executing Tasks from Research Repositoriescited by 52
  4. 2025CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoringcited by 49
  5. 2025SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarioscited by 49
  6. 2026Reward Hacking in the Era of Large Models: Mechanisms, Emergent Misalignment, Challengescited by 30
  7. 2026Reward Hacking Benchmark: Measuring Exploits in LLM Agents with Tool Usecited by 25
  8. 2026SpecBench: Measuring Reward Hacking in Long-Horizon Coding Agentscited by 25
  9. 2026LLMs Gaming Verifiers: RLVR can Lead to Reward Hackingcited by 24
  10. 2026Benchmarking Reward Hack Detection in Code Environments via Contrastive Analysiscited by 15
  11. 2026Countdown-Code: A Testbed for Studying The Emergence and Generalization of Reward Hacking in RLVRcited by 15
  12. 2026Terminal Wrench: A Dataset of 331 Reward-Hackable Environments and 3,632 Exploit Trajectoriescited by 14
  13. 2026Hack-Verifiable Environments: Towards Evaluating Reward Hacking at Scalecited by 9
  14. 2026Towards Understanding Specification Gaming in Reasoning Modelscited by 3
  15. 2019Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 19.

19 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Gradingcited by 20
  2. 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Taskscited by 8
  3. 2026SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoringcited by 5
  4. 2026MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alonecited by 4
  5. 2026BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology taskscited by 1
  6. 2026Beyond Code Generation: Reliability, Verification, and Cost Economics in the Agentic Software Development Lifecyclecited by 1
  7. 2026SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agentscited by 1
  8. 2026Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performancecited by 0
  9. 2026BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requestscited by 0
  10. 2026Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Tracescited by 0
  11. 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?cited by 0
  12. 2026Marathoner: Ultra-Long-Horizon Autonomous Intelligencecited by 0
7 more
  1. 2026StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agentscited by 0
  2. 2026TomasuLLM: Out-of-Order Speculative Execution for LLM Agentscited by 0
  3. 2026Incident-Arena: Getting agents to the last nine of reliabilitycited by 0
  4. 2026Cross-Benchmark Transfer from RL on Agentic Coding Taskscited by 0
  5. 2026LiveMACE: Process-Aware Evaluation of LLM Agent Capabilities in Evolving Marketscited by 0
  6. 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolutioncited by 0
  7. 2026SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interactioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SWE-Milestone: Evaluating AI Agents on Continuous Software Evolution
  2. 2026SWE-MILE: Asynchronous Potential-Induced Milestone Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Software Engineering Agents
  3. 2026SWE-TRACE: Optimizing Long-Horizon SWE Agents Through Rubric Process Reward Models and Heuristic Test-Time Scaling
  4. 2026LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces
  5. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions
  6. 2026OS-Marathon: Benchmarking Computer-Use Agents on Vast-Horizon, Repetitive Tasks
  7. 2026SWE-Cycle: Benchmarking Code Agents across the Complete Issue Resolution Cycle
  8. 2026openJiuwen: Beyond Static Harnesses for Long-Horizon Coding Agents