mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoring

arXiv 2608.09802 ↗First posted 10 Aug 2026cs.CL cs.SEcited by 5

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As AI coding agents take on increasingly complex, long-horizon software engineering tasks, existing benchmarks are rapidly saturating and their evaluation quality has come under serious scrutiny: a recent audit found that nearly 60% of unsolved SWE-bench Verified instances contain flawed tests -- either overly narrow tests that reject correct solutions or overly broad tests that check unstated requirements -- and that frontier models can verbatim reproduce gold patches from training data. Code refactoring, which requires coordinated, behavior-preserving changes across many files, offers a substantially harder and more realistic test of agent capability, yet remains underserved by current benchmarks. We introduce SWE-Bench ProMax, an expert-curated, multilingual code refactoring benchmark of 170 instances drawn from real commits across seven programming languages (Python, Java, TypeScript, Go, C, C++, and Rust). Every instance undergoes rigorous, multi-stage curation that directly addresses the quality problems identified in prior benchmarks: issue descriptions are rewritten from scratch to provide precise, unambiguous specifications, and test suites are manually reviewed to remove overly narrow and overly broad tests. Tasks with insufficient complexity or limited cross-file scope are filtered out, yielding a benchmark of challenging, large-scale refactoring tasks that average 11.4 modified files and 261.6 lines of code per instance, substantially exceeding the scale of existing benchmarks. Experiments with frontier models under two agent scaffolds show that the best model achieves only 41.2% resolve rate, confirming that SWE-Bench ProMax presents a meaningful and unsaturated challenge for current AI coding agents. Our benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/swe-bench-promax/SWE-Bench-ProMax.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2026.

Builds on

44 of 55 references.

Closest ancestors · 17

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DeepSWE: Measuring Frontier Coding Agents on Original, Long-Horizon Engineering Tasks8 Jul
  2. 2026Dockerless: Environment-Free Program Verifier for Coding Agents26 Jun
  3. 2026SWE-MeM: Learning Adaptive Memory Management for Long-Horizon Coding Agents26 Jun
  4. 2026CodeTaste: Can LLMs Generate Human-Level Code Refactorings?4 Mar
  5. 2026Qwen3-Coder-Next Technical Report28 Feb
  6. 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering17 Feb
  7. 2026LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces15 Feb
  8. 2026Immersion in the GitHub Universe: Scaling Coding Agents to Mastery10 Feb
  9. 2026SWE-Pruner: Self-Adaptive Context Pruning for Coding Agents23 Jan
  10. 2025SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios20 Dec
  11. 2025Agentic Refactoring: An Empirical Study of AI Coding Agents6 Nov
  12. 2025SWE-Debate: Competitive Multi-Agent Debate for Software Issue Resolution31 Jul
5 more
  1. 2025SWE-rebench: An Automated Pipeline for Task Collection and Decontaminated Evaluation of Software Engineering Agents26 May
  2. 2025SWE-PolyBench: A multi-language benchmark for repository level evaluation of coding agents11 Apr
  3. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  4. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents1 Jul
  5. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 27

  1. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  2. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
  3. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  4. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
  5. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 910
  6. 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 523
  7. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  8. 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 449
  9. 2024DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligencecited by 325
  10. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 254
  11. 2025Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolvingcited by 165
  12. 2025SWE-bench Goes Live!cited by 74
15 more
  1. 2025SWE-Exp: Experience-Driven Software Issue Resolutioncited by 64
  2. 2024From Code to Correctness: Closing the Last Mile of Code Generation with Hierarchical Debuggingcited by 46
  3. 2025LongCodeZip: Compress Long Context for Code Language Modelscited by 38
  4. 2025SWE-QA: Can Language Models Answer Repository-level Code Questions?cited by 37
  5. 2025Pruning the Unsurprising: Efficient LLM Reasoning via First-Token Surprisalcited by 32
  6. 2025RefactorBench: Evaluating Stateful Reasoning in Language Agents Through Codecited by 28
  7. 2024Between Lines of Code: Unraveling the Distinct Patterns of Machine and Human Programmerscited by 27
  8. 2024An Empirical Study on the Code Refactoring Capability of Large Language Modelscited by 19
  9. 2026SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?cited by 19
  10. 2026In Line with Context: Repository-Level Code Generation via Context Inliningcited by 18
  11. 2026GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughtscited by 16
  12. 2026Seeing is Coding: On the Effectiveness of Vision Language Models in Code Understandingcited by 13
  13. 2026daVinci-Env: Open SWE Environment Synthesis at Scalecited by 13
  14. 2026SWE-Refactor: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Real-World LLM-Based Code Refactoringcited by 11
  15. 2025Code Refactoring with LLM: A Comprehensive Evaluation With Few-Shot Settingscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 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. 2026SmellBench: Towards Fine-Grained Evaluation of Code Agents on Refactoring Tasks
  3. 2025SWE-Compass: Towards Unified Evaluation of Agentic Coding Abilities for Large Language Models
  4. 2025SWE-Sharp-Bench: A Reproducible Benchmark for C# Software Engineering Tasks
  5. 2026ChainSWE: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Multi-Bug Software Maintenance
  6. 2026SWE-Cycle: Benchmarking Code Agents across the Complete Issue Resolution Cycle
  7. 2026SWE-Explore: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Explore Repositories
  8. 2026A Unified Issue Resolution Benchmark for Requirement Clarification, Planning, and Code Generation for Coding Agents