SWE-Critix: Post-Training Generalist Verifiers for Assessing Coding-Agent Trajectories
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Coding agents are increasingly deployed for end-to-end software engineering tasks, where a readily available oracle evaluator that defines the success criteria is often absent. This motivates verifications for coding agents that can reliably judge and explain their behavior. However, verification is non-trivial as coding agents are increasingly capable of solving long-horizon software engineering tasks. Their execution trajectories can be extremely long, containing hundreds of iterative interactions with code repositories and external tools. Existing verifiers either rely on general-purpose LLMs without specialized training or train dedicated critics that predominantly focus on producing scalar rewards, highlighting the relatively limited exploration of training-based generalist verification. We introduce SWE-Critix, a post-training pipeline for training generalist verifiers of coding-agent trajectories. Given a task and its execution trajectory, the learned verifier predicts the completion label and generates a natural-language analysis that explains its judgment. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) and trains a series of 30B models on trajectories from CodeForge-Preview. On a held-out test set, SWE-Critix improves classification accuracy from 57% for the base Qwen3-30B-A3B reasoning model to 66% after SFT and 78% after RL. We release our models, datasets, and training code to facilitate further research.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2026.
Builds on
40 of 49 references.
Closest ancestors · 25
Same direction, newest first
- 2026LoLBench: Evaluating Coding Agents with Long-Horizon Proposals on Large Software Systems29 Sep
- 2026ExecCritic: Learn to Test, Test to Improve for Coding Agents8 Sep
- 2026Independent Patch Verification for Coding Agents with a Bidirectional Reconstruct-and-Verify Framework9 Aug
- 2026Online Monitoring and Corrective Steering of Programming Agents7 Aug
- 2026TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories6 Aug
- 2026SWE-Review: Closing the Loop on Issue Resolution with Agentic Code Review7 Jul
- 2026Dockerless: Environment-Free Program Verifier for Coding Agents26 Jun
- 2026Steer, Don't Solve: Training Small Critic Models for Large Code Agents20 Jun
- 2026Open-SWE-Traces: Advancing Dual-Mode Multilingual Distillation for Software Engineering Agents14 Jun
- 2026ProcCtrlBench: Evaluating Process-Level Defects and Control Preservation in LLM Coding Agents18 May
- 2026SWE-TRACE: Optimizing Long-Horizon SWE Agents Through Rubric Process Reward Models and Heuristic Test-Time Scaling16 Apr
- 2026A Rubric-Supervised Critic from Sparse Real-World Outcomes4 Mar
13 more
- 2026Wink: Recovering from Misbehaviors in Coding Agents19 Feb
- 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering17 Feb
- 2026Agentic Rubrics as Contextual Verifiers for SWE Agents7 Jan
- 2025SWE-RM: Execution-free Feedback For Software Engineering Agents26 Dec
- 2025When Agents go Astray: Course-Correcting SWE Agents with PRMs2 Sep
- 2025Trae Agent: An LLM-based Agent for Software Engineering with Test-time Scaling31 Jul
- 2025SWE-rebench: An Automated Pipeline for Task Collection and Decontaminated Evaluation of Software Engineering Agents26 May
- 2025Guided Search Strategies in Non-Serializable Environments with Applications to Software Engineering Agents19 May
- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents30 Apr
- 2025R2E-Gym: Procedural Environments and Hybrid Verifiers for Scaling Open-Weights SWE Agents9 Apr
- 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym30 Dec
- 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
- 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents1 Jul
Other references · 15
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
- 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 279
- 2024QuRating: Selecting High-Quality Data for Training Language Modelscited by 157
- 2025RM-R1: Reward Modeling as Reasoningcited by 154
- 2026DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compressioncited by 76
- 2025Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 58
- 2026LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Frameworkcited by 30
3 more
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- 2026SWE-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Code Agents
- 2026Yet Even Less Is Even Better For Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding LLMs
- 2026SPROUT: Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Software Engineering
- 2026AutoCompact: Learning When to Compact Context in Long-Horizon Coding Agents
- 2026Latent Programming Horizons in Coding Agents
- 2026CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself
- 2026Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills