Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on software engineering (SE) tasks, driving the need for high-quality datasets for reliable training and evaluation. SWE-bench-style datasets (SWE datasets) are widely used to evaluate LLM-based coding agents on real-world software issues, where task clarity and test coverage directly affect whether instances are solvable and verifiable. However, quality issues persist in existing SWE datasets, and manual annotation is costly and labor-intensive, motivating LLM-based annotation. Existing approaches typically rely on static, overly general rubrics, limiting their ability to handle diverse and nuanced scenarios and often yielding high false positive rates. In contrast, human annotators draw on accumulated experience to make context-aware judgments. Inspired by this, we propose ExLabel, an LLM-based, self-evolving, experience-guided assistant for task clarity and test coverage assessment in SWE datasets. ExLabel maintains an evolving experience bank that distills cross-instance knowledge into stable yet adaptive judgment criteria and reuses relevant experience to guide the assessment of new instances. For systematic evaluation, we construct SWE-TQ, a new benchmark spanning eight programming languages, by cleaning human annotations from SWE-bench and Multi-SWE-bench. Experiments with three backbone LLMs show that ExLabel achieves the best F1 across all settings, with relative improvements of 44.2%/49.9% and 24.0%/18.4% over the best baseline for task clarity and test coverage assessment on the Python/Multilingual subsets, respectively. Moreover, a coding model fine-tuned on SWE-rebench data filtered by ExLabel resolves 66.2% of issues on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming the model trained on data filtered by the best baseline by 14.5%.
Lingxiao Tang, He Ye University College London, University of London, Zhaoyang Chu, Muyang Ye, Zhongxin Liu Zhejiang University, Xiaoxue Ren Zhejiang University, Lingfeng Bao
Code LLMs still struggle with code execution reasoning, especially in smaller models. Existing methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with teacher-generated explanations, primarily in two forms: (1) input–output (I/O) prediction chains and (2) natural-language descriptions of execution traces. However, intermediate execution steps cannot be explicitly verified during SFT, so the training objective can reduce to merely matching teacher explanations. Moreover, training data is typically collected without explicit control over task difficulty. We introduce ExecVerify, which goes beyond text imitation by incorporating verifiable white-box rewards derived from execution traces, including next-statement prediction and variable value/type prediction. Our work first builds a dataset with multiple difficulty levels via constraint-based program synthesis. Then, we apply reinforcement learning (RL) to reward correct answers about both intermediate execution steps and final outputs, aligning the training objective with semantic correctness at each execution step. Finally, we adopt a two-stage training pipeline that first enhances execution reasoning and then transfers to code generation. Experiments demonstrate that a 7B model trained with ExecVerify achieves performance comparable to 32B models on code reasoning benchmarks and improves pass@1 by up to 5.9% on code generation tasks over strong post-training baselines.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表