# A Systematic Evaluation of Trajectory Data Curation for LoRA Fine-Tuning of Code Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 15 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 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, 15 of 15)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01030/) (2024)
- [What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15685/) (2023)
- [Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21139/) (2024)
- [From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12032/) (2023)
- [SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21798/) (2025)
- [Scaling Laws Are Unreliable for Downstream Tasks: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00885/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [What Makes Good Agentic Data? An ACE Lens on Data Generation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27260/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of open-weight LLMs on expert agent trajectories has emerged as a prominent approach to building capable code agents without reliance on proprietary models. A central yet underexplored question is how trajectory quality and quantity jointly shape model performance. We present a systematic empirical study of trajectory data filtering for LoRA fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct on the SWE-trajectory dataset (67,074 trajectories, of which 32,161 are resolved). We propose a two-axis quality scoring framework -- Efficiency and Style -- and evaluate it through 16 controlled experiments spanning strategy, scale, and ablation analyses. Since 7B-scale models attain near-zero SWE-bench resolve rates, we adopt cross-entropy (CE) loss on held-out trajectories as the primary metric, validated via first-action generation: CE loss and ROUGE-L are perfectly rank-correlated (Spearman ρ = -1.00), with limited-sample evidence supporting but not conclusively establishing this proxy. Our results reveal a scale-dependent quality-quantity trade-off: at small scales, doubling the dataset (500 to 1,000) yields ~12.7% CE-loss reduction whereas the TopQ-Random gap stays <1% (Mann-Whitney p > 0.10); at 2,000 trajectories this same gap widens to 3.6% (p = 0.016). Ablation further identifies error-retry rate as the dominant sub-dimension, performing comparably to the full composite (Delta < 0.2%). Together, these findings establish trajectory-level quality scoring as a viable but scale-sensitive lever for code-agent SFT and offer a proxy-validated evaluation protocol for the regime where end-to-end resolve rate is statistically infeasible.