Dewu Zheng, Ruizhe Ye, Yanlin Wang +7cs.SE cs.AI cs.CL
To improve large language models' ability to resolve real-world software issues, prior work has focused on constructing large-scale agent trajectory datasets and performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on successful trajectories. However, task success does not guarantee high-quality supervision: successful trajectories may still contain ineffective, redundant, or risky steps. Directly using such trajectories for SFT can introduce noisy supervision and encourage models to imitate undesirable problem-solving behaviors. Therefore, we propose SWE-Prime, a multi-granularity, two-stage SFT data selection method that progressively filters training data at the trajectory and segment levels. Specifically, the first stage performs trajectory-level screening based on process quality, result quality, and data representativeness, selecting a high-quality and representative subset of successful trajectories. The second stage performs segment-level selection by grouping consecutive steps into semantic segments and assessing each segment based on its contribution to the final solution, learnability, and potential risks. During SFT, all segments remain in the sequence to preserve context, while only selected segments contribute to the loss computation. Experiments on SWE-Bench Pro and SWE-Bench Verified show that training on the 10% trajectory subset selected by SWE-Prime outperforms training on the full resolved dataset, yielding relative performance gains of up to 12.2% and 24.2%, respectively.
Alex Mathai, Shobini Iyer, Aleksandr Nogikh +4cs.SE cs.AI cs.OS
Coding agents are increasingly used to accelerate code generation in many downstream tasks, such as fixing bugs, building applications, and prototyping. However, despite their value as coding assistants, agent-generated code tends to be larger and more verbose than the corresponding human-written implementation. In this work, we show that the cause lies in the agent's own search process: while iterating toward a passing solution, an agent accumulates speculative edits, abandoned hypotheses, and temporary changes that persist into the final patch. This may seem harmless for a single patch, but the problem compounds as agents take responsibility for ever-larger portions of a codebase-a codebase that was once minimal and well-maintained slowly accumulates redundancy faster than it can be cleaned up, drifting to a state that is harder to maintain. Given the magnitude of this problem, we take a step towards alleviating this issue. First, we formally define this phenomenon as CodeSlop-the residual and functionally unnecessary edits commonly seen in AI-generated code. We then introduce our algorithm TRIM (Trajectory-guided Redundancy Identification and Minimization). Rather than minimizing CodeSlop directly, TRIM instead minimizes agent trajectories. As we show empirically, this indirect technique of minimizing CodeSlop is highly effective: TRIM cuts CodeSlop by 17.9%-32.9% across agentic scaffolds, with negligible performance regression. TRIM is also highly efficient, requiring roughly half the validation cost of algorithmic baselines such as Delta Debugging.
Amirali Sajadi, Tu Nguyen, Kimmie Huynh +2cs.SE cs.AI cs.HC
LLM-based automated program repair (APR) agents generate patches to fix software bugs with minimal human intervention. These agents often produce long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback to produce candidate patches. Final patch outcomes show whether a repair attempt succeeded or failed, but they do not show how the agent reached that outcome, or where the process became repetitive or misaligned with the task. This makes agentic repair failures difficult to diagnose, reproduce, and prevent. To help developers address these challenges, we present TraceView, an interactive tool for labeling and visualizing repair trajectories from APR systems. TraceView organizes raw and pre-labeled agentic runs with Thought, Action, and Result components to support semantic relation labeling and diagnosis, and renders the resulting trajectory as graph views. Furthermore, TraceView provides relation filters, patch outcome summaries, metrics, and node-level evidence panels to help users inspect how reasoning, actions, and feedback connect across the various steps of an agentic repair attempt. We evaluate TraceView with five researchers through a survey-based user study. Participants reported that TraceView made trajectories easier to scan and that its overview-to-detail workflow helped them better understand repair behavior. The TraceView source code is available at https://github.com/SOAR-Lab/agent-traj-visualization. A screencast of TraceView is available at https://youtu.be/9ZCh7Ifj2AQ.