SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agents

Abstract:SWE-Bench Pro has emerged as a standard benchmark for evaluating software engineering agents on challenging repository-level tasks. However, our analysis work show that its evaluation is undermined by two sources of unreliability: \textbf{reward hacking}, enabled by leakage of gold solutions or hidden evaluation information, and \textbf{task quality issues}, including misleading problem statements and improperly scoped tests. These issues can inflate benchmark performance and obscure agents' true coding ability. We present \textbf{SWE-Bench Pro Verified}, a verified version of SWE-Bench Pro that addresses both problems. Our approach combines \textbf{anti-hacking} safeguards that eliminate major leakage channels without disrupting normal agent functionality, with \textbf{task refinement} that minimally corrects inconsistencies within flawed instances. Evaluations on SWE-Bench Pro Verified reveal that some models perform substantially worse than previously reported, suggesting that existing results on SWE-Bench Pro may overestimate real software engineering capability. SWE-Bench Pro Verified offers a more trustworthy benchmark for assessing software engineering agents.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

arXiv:2609.08149 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.08149v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08149 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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