Beyond Pass@k: Measuring Reliability and Security of Agentic Code Generation

arXiv:2608.14711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI coding agent benchmarks rank agents with the Chen et al. (2021) pass@k estimator, but current implementations misapply it: they set n to the number of unit tests in a single submission rather than the number of independent rollout attempts, conflating test-suite size with attempt independence. We diagnose this operationalization error, prove it by counterexample, and propose reliability@k, the same estimator applied correctly, with n = independent rollouts and c = fully-passing rollouts per (task, agent) pair. In a synthetic multi-rollout benchmark, the misapplied metric inflates reported scores by 0.85-0.97 in absolute terms (0.96-0.98 reported vs. 0.00-0.12 corrected), and a cheap single-rollout proxy fails to substitute for repeated runs (Spearman $\rho = 0.417$). Motivated by evidence that functional correctness does not imply security safety, we additionally propose security-adjusted reliability@k, which counts only rollouts that are both functionally correct and free of high-severity insecure patterns. In an initial live-API test with three agents, the adjustment did not change any ranking under our current scanner and threshold, so we present it as a proposed complementary lens whose decisive evaluation requires better-powered future runs. Finally, a preliminary 5-task SWE-bench Verified pilot observes the same core concern in a real repository setting: macro-averaged hidden-test pass rate was 0.80 while strict task resolution was 0.20.

Abstract:AI coding agent benchmarks rank agents with the Chen et al. (2021) pass@k estimator, but current implementations misapply it: they set n to the number of unit tests in a single submission rather than the number of independent rollout attempts, conflating test-suite size with attempt independence. We diagnose this operationalization error, prove it by counterexample, and propose reliability@k, the same estimator applied correctly, with n = independent rollouts and c = fully-passing rollouts per (task, agent) pair. In a synthetic multi-rollout benchmark, the misapplied metric inflates reported scores by 0.85-0.97 in absolute terms (0.96-0.98 reported vs. 0.00-0.12 corrected), and a cheap single-rollout proxy fails to substitute for repeated runs (Spearman $\rho = 0.417$). Motivated by evidence that functional correctness does not imply security safety, we additionally propose security-adjusted reliability@k, which counts only rollouts that are both functionally correct and free of high-severity insecure patterns. In an initial live-API test with three agents, the adjustment did not change any ranking under our current scanner and threshold, so we present it as a proposed complementary lens whose decisive evaluation requires better-powered future runs. Finally, a preliminary 5-task SWE-bench Verified pilot observes the same core concern in a real repository setting: macro-averaged hidden-test pass rate was 0.80 while strict task resolution was 0.20.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.14711 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.14711v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14711 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Beyond Pass@k: Measuring Reliability and Security of Agentic Code Generation

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