mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

FrogNano: Training a 4B Coding Agent via Online Task Synthesis

arXiv 2609.07925 ↗First posted 7 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 3

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

Abstract (arXiv)

We present FrogNano, a 4B coding agent designed to tackle software engineering (SWE) tasks efficiently and effectively, even under resource-constrained environments. It is post-trained exclusively via RL on around 1,500 SWE environments with synthetic tasks. A key ingredient for improving performance is an online task synthesis pipeline that creates tasks calibrated to the frontier of learnability for the current checkpoint. This report provides evidence that competitive small coding agents can be trained with synthetic tasks alone, without traditional distillation from larger models, and that generating tasks at the learnability frontier of the current agent is important. We report details on the training methodology, evaluations across diverse environments, and in-depth analyses, serving as a foundation for our ongoing exploration of lightweight yet capable coding agents that can run on minimal hardware.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 56 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2026.

Builds on

56 of 66 references.

Closest ancestors · 13

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SWE-MeM: Learning Adaptive Memory Management for Long-Horizon Coding Agents26 Jun
  2. 2026Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills5 Jun
  3. 2026Immersion in the GitHub Universe: Scaling Coding Agents to Mastery10 Feb
  4. 2025Toward Training Superintelligent Software Agents through Self-Play SWE-RL21 Dec
  5. 2025SWE-Dev: Building Software Engineering Agents with Training and Inference Scaling9 Jun
  6. 2025SWE-rebench: An Automated Pipeline for Task Collection and Decontaminated Evaluation of Software Engineering Agents26 May
  7. 2025R2E-Gym: Procedural Environments and Hybrid Verifiers for Scaling Open-Weights SWE Agents9 Apr
  8. 2025debug-gym: A Text-Based Environment for Interactive Debugging27 Mar
  9. 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym30 Dec
  10. 2024SWE-Search: Enhancing Software Agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Iterative Refinement26 Oct
  11. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  12. 2024RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair25 Mar
1 more
  1. 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents1 Feb

Other references · 43

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,091
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,274
  3. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,729
  4. 2024Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Reportcited by 1,179
  5. 2023SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programscited by 1,117
  6. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 547
  7. 2022CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 348
  8. 2024AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvementcited by 274
  9. 2020Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Designcited by 263
  10. 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 263
  11. 2017Automatic Goal Generation for Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 254
  12. 2025SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolutioncited by 252
31 more
  1. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 247
  2. 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 240
  3. 2023InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedbackcited by 234
  4. 2020Prioritized Level Replaycited by 192
  5. 2022Evolving Curricula with Regret-Based Environment Designcited by 168
  6. 2024RLEF: Grounding Code LLMs in Execution Feedback with Reinforcement Learningcited by 150
  7. 2023RLTF: Reinforcement Learning from Unit Test Feedbackcited by 112
  8. 2024RepoGraph: Enhancing AI Software Engineering with Repository-level Code Graphcited by 90
  9. 2025Agent-RLVR: Training Software Engineering Agents via Guidance and Environment Rewardscited by 41
  10. 2025Training Long-Context, Multi-Turn Software Engineering Agents with Reinforcement Learningcited by 35
  11. 2026Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learningcited by 33
  12. 2026Single-Rollout Asynchronous Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
  13. 2025Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Modelscited by 31
  14. 2026How Do AI Agents Spend Your Money? Analyzing and Predicting Token Consumption in Agentic Coding Taskscited by 31
  15. 2025SWE-Mirror: Scaling Issue-Resolving Datasets by Mirroring Issues Across Repositoriescited by 30
  16. 2025PipelineRL: Faster On-policy Reinforcement Learning for Long Sequence Generationcited by 30
  17. 2026SWE-Lego: Pushing the Limits of Supervised Fine-tuning for Software Issue Resolvingcited by 30
  18. 2025BugPilot: Complex Bug Generation for Efficient Learning of SWE Skillscited by 28
  19. 2026Tmax: A simple recipe for terminal agentscited by 27
  20. 2025PATCHEVAL: A New Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Patching Real-World Vulnerabilitiescited by 19
  21. 2025SWE-Flow: Synthesizing Software Engineering Data in a Test-Driven Mannercited by 18
  22. 2026Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scalecited by 14
  23. 2026DORA: A Scalable Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Model Trainingcited by 13
  24. 2026Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Taskscited by 10
  25. 2026SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environmentscited by 8
  26. 2026Orchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling Frameworkcited by 7
  27. 2026SCALECUA: Scaling Computer Use Agents with Verifiable Task Synthesis and Efficient Online RLcited by 7
  28. 2026CalibForge: Adversarial Solver Calibration for Scaling Learnable Terminal Taskscited by 5
  29. 2025Beyond Fixed Tasks: Unsupervised Environment Design for Task-Level Pairscited by 2
  30. 2026Envs-FORGE: Frontier-Optimized Reward-Grounded Environment Synthesis for Agent RLcited by 2
  31. 2026FailForge: Distilling Procedural Competence from Persistent Failures into Code Agentscited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Training Versatile Coding Agents in Synthetic Environments
  2. 2026Hybrid-Gym: Training Coding Agents to Generalize Across Tasks
  3. 2025Kimi-Dev: Agentless Training as Skill Prior for SWE-Agents
  4. 2026SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineering
  5. 2026SWE-Duel: Towards a Self-Scaling Arena for Coding Agents
  6. 2026CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself
  7. 2025SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios
  8. 2026Scaling Coding Agents via Atomic Skills