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This paper introduces WitnessGym, a framework designed to benchmark coding agents on their ability to construct executable bug witnesses rather than relying on historical datasets. By automatically injecting bugs into real-world Java projects and preserving witness behavior through structural transformations, the study reveals that generating valid evidence for audit findings remains a significant challenge even for advanced models. The work advances the field of AI-assisted software engineering by providing a rigorous, scalable evaluation method specifically tailored to the nuances of bug validation tasks.
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WitnessGym: Benchmarking Coding Agents on the Construction of Bug Witnesses

arXiv2 min read

arXiv:2609.36635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bug validation asks a coding agent to produce an executable witness for a reported bug. The witness combines a concrete input with a testing harness and exposes faulty behavior during execution. Such evidence makes audit findings actionable, yet benchmark evaluation is difficult when cases reuse public historical bugs and witnesses or require manual construction. We present WitnessGym, an automated framework for constructing bug-validation benchmarks through bug injection. It injects bugs into test-reached paths of real projects, rebuilds each project, and retains cases exposed by a construction-time witness. Bug specifications and execution adapters allow extension to additional bug types and languages. Bug-preserving transformations vary the surrounding structure while preserving the witness behavior. Based on real-world Java projects with test suites, WitnessGym automatically constructs 1,300 benchmark cases. The injected patches resemble historical bug patches and are difficult for the two evaluated models to distinguish in blinded comparisons. We evaluate four coding agent frameworks in six framework/model pairings across bug types, execution contexts, and transformation depths. Witness construction remains difficult even when the bug pattern is known. Our framework, benchmark cases, and evaluation scripts are available.

Abstract:Bug validation asks a coding agent to produce an executable witness for a reported bug. The witness combines a concrete input with a testing harness and exposes faulty behavior during execution. Such evidence makes audit findings actionable, yet benchmark evaluation is difficult when cases reuse public historical bugs and witnesses or require manual construction. We present WitnessGym, an automated framework for constructing bug-validation benchmarks through bug injection. It injects bugs into test-reached paths of real projects, rebuilds each project, and retains cases exposed by a construction-time witness. Bug specifications and execution adapters allow extension to additional bug types and languages. Bug-preserving transformations vary the surrounding structure while preserving the witness behavior. Based on real-world Java projects with test suites, WitnessGym automatically constructs 1,300 benchmark cases. The injected patches resemble historical bug patches and are difficult for the two evaluated models to distinguish in blinded comparisons. We evaluate four coding agent frameworks in six framework/model pairings across bug types, execution contexts, and transformation depths. Witness construction remains difficult even when the bug pattern is known. Our framework, benchmark cases, and evaluation scripts are available.

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

arXiv:2609.36635 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.36635v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36635 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 280 words

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