SWE-Proof: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World Issues with Machine-Checked Proofs?

Title:SWE-Proof: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World Issues with Machine-Checked Proofs?

Abstract:Ensuring the correctness of LLM-generated code is a core challenge for modern software engineering. Benchmarks for agentic code generation check correctness with held-out test suites, which are inherently incomplete and increasingly susceptible to memorization. Formal verification avoids both problems, but existing work covers only standalone tasks whose specifications are given as input, not real issues, which touch large repositories and state intent in vague natural language. We present Benchproofer, a pipeline that turns a coding task with a known correct patch into a formally verified one: it writes a specification for the new code, summarizes the existing functions that code calls with axioms, and admits an instance only after mechanical and adversarial gates agree. Applying it to SWE-bench Verified yields SWE-Proof, 500 real issues whose correctness is formally verified rather than tested, and it extends to SWE-bench Pro. Across two frontier models, verification catches what tests miss: a quarter to a half of test-passing patches admit counterexamples, which a structured natural-language specification does not fix, while a correct formal one lifts resolution from 85% to 95% for Opus 4.8. Writing that specification is the hard part: models that must write their own gain nothing over an unaided baseline, and only 62% of their specifications pass our audit. The usual failure is faithfulness, a specification that constrains part of the required behavior and leaves the rest free. Specification quality still tracks the outcome, failing on 89% of unresolved instances against 47% of resolved ones, making faithful specification synthesis a concrete open problem.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

arXiv:2609.21190 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.21190v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21190 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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