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Nov 9

Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025 1

SkillScriptBench: Benchmarking Self-Evolution of Executable Agent Skill Packages Beyond Markdown

Executable Agent Skills combine natural-language instructions and scripts into reusable packages for LLM agents, and revising them requires fixing errors without breaking correct behavior. Existing benchmarks do not systematically distinguish documentation repair, script repair, and preservation when evaluating skill self-evolution. We introduce SkillScriptBench, a 350-task benchmark designed to evaluate these capabilities separately. From a survey of over 35,000 GitHub-hosted Skill roots, we select 100 packages and construct 150 repair tasks. Each task pairs a package containing injected script faults with a maintenance request and executable checks of the required behavior. A complementary controlled track contains 200 tasks from 50 packages, each evaluated under the same maintenance request in four states: clean, documentation faults, script faults, and faults in both. Across four LLMs, methods that edit both documentation and scripts can repair script faults but do not consistently outperform Markdown-only revision on documentation repair or preservation. We therefore introduce AST-Guided Skill Revision, which uses abstract syntax trees and calling relationships to link maintenance requirements to relevant code locations. It restricts script edits to these locations and updates the documentation to match the revised scripts. Averaged across models, this revision stage yields absolute gains in repair success of 21.9% for Raw Package and 27.7% for CoEvoSkills on faulty packages. Absolute gains in the proportion of tasks solved in all three runs reach 20.8% and 31.5%, respectively, indicating more consistent repair success across repeated runs.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 1

S-Bus: Automatic Read-Set Reconstruction for Multi-Agent LLM State Coordination

Concurrent LLM agents sharing mutable natural-language state produce Structural Race Conditions (SRCs): write-write and cross-shard stale-read conflicts that silently corrupt agent output. Existing multi-agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen) provide no write-ownership semantics over shared state. We present S-Bus, an HTTP middleware whose central mechanism is a server-side DeliveryLog: a per-agent log of HTTP GET operations that automatically reconstructs each agent's read set at commit time without agent SDK changes under HTTP/1.1. The consistency property the DeliveryLog provides -- Observable-Read Isolation (ORI), a partial causal consistency over the HTTP-observable projection of the read set -- prevents structural race conditions when agents collaborate via shared shards. Three contributions: (C1) The DeliveryLog mechanism for automatic HTTP-traffic-based read-set reconstruction, with three-tier mechanised evidence: ReadSetSoundness and ORICommitSafety machine-checked in TLAPS (modulo one retained typing axiom); exhaustive TLC at N=3 (20,763,484 distinct states, zero violations); Dafny discharges 9 inductive soundness lemmas. (C2) Empirical structural-conflict prevention parity against PostgreSQL 17 SERIALIZABLE and Redis 7 WATCH/MULTI on shared-shard contention sweeps with 427,308 active HTTP-409 conflicts: zero Type-I corruptions across all three backends. (C3) ORI's operating envelope is topology-conditional: semantically neutral in dedicated-shard workloads; harmful in single-shard collaborative writing because preservation propagates concurrent contradictions. Source code: https://github.com/sajjadanwar0/sbus

  • 1 authors
·
May 15 1

MULTISCRIPT: Multimodal Script Learning for Supporting Open Domain Everyday Tasks

Automatically generating scripts (i.e. sequences of key steps described in text) from video demonstrations and reasoning about the subsequent steps are crucial to the modern AI virtual assistants to guide humans to complete everyday tasks, especially unfamiliar ones. However, current methods for generative script learning rely heavily on well-structured preceding steps described in text and/or images or are limited to a certain domain, resulting in a disparity with real-world user scenarios. To address these limitations, we present a new benchmark challenge -- MultiScript, with two new tasks on task-oriented multimodal script learning: (1) multimodal script generation, and (2) subsequent step prediction. For both tasks, the input consists of a target task name and a video illustrating what has been done to complete the target task, and the expected output is (1) a sequence of structured step descriptions in text based on the demonstration video, and (2) a single text description for the subsequent step, respectively. Built from WikiHow, MultiScript covers multimodal scripts in videos and text descriptions for over 6,655 human everyday tasks across 19 diverse domains. To establish baseline performance on MultiScript, we propose two knowledge-guided multimodal generative frameworks that incorporate the task-related knowledge prompted from large language models such as Vicuna. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches significantly improve over the competitive baselines.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 7, 2023

"Kurosawa": A Script Writer's Assistant

Storytelling is the lifeline of the entertainment industry -- movies, TV shows, and stand-up comedies, all need stories. A good and gripping script is the lifeline of storytelling and demands creativity and resource investment. Good scriptwriters are rare to find and often work under severe time pressure. Consequently, entertainment media are actively looking for automation. In this paper, we present an AI-based script-writing workbench called KUROSAWA which addresses the tasks of plot generation and script generation. Plot generation aims to generate a coherent and creative plot (600-800 words) given a prompt (15-40 words). Script generation, on the other hand, generates a scene (200-500 words) in a screenplay format from a brief description (15-40 words). Kurosawa needs data to train. We use a 4-act structure of storytelling to annotate the plot dataset manually. We create a dataset of 1000 manually annotated plots and their corresponding prompts/storylines and a gold-standard dataset of 1000 scenes with four main elements -- scene headings, action lines, dialogues, and character names -- tagged individually. We fine-tune GPT-3 with the above datasets to generate plots and scenes. These plots and scenes are first evaluated and then used by the scriptwriters of a large and famous media platform ErosNow. We release the annotated datasets and the models trained on these datasets as a working benchmark for automatic movie plot and script generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 6, 2023

An Empirical Study on Developers Shared Conversations with ChatGPT in GitHub Pull Requests and Issues

ChatGPT has significantly impacted software development practices, providing substantial assistance to developers in a variety of tasks, including coding, testing, and debugging. Despite its widespread adoption, the impact of ChatGPT as an assistant in collaborative coding remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we analyze a dataset of 210 and 370 developers shared conversations with ChatGPT in GitHub pull requests (PRs) and issues. We manually examined the content of the conversations and characterized the dynamics of the sharing behavior, i.e., understanding the rationale behind the sharing, identifying the locations where the conversations were shared, and determining the roles of the developers who shared them. Our main observations are: (1) Developers seek ChatGPT assistance across 16 types of software engineering inquiries. In both conversations shared in PRs and issues, the most frequently encountered inquiry categories include code generation, conceptual questions, how-to guides, issue resolution, and code review. (2) Developers frequently engage with ChatGPT via multi-turn conversations where each prompt can fulfill various roles, such as unveiling initial or new tasks, iterative follow-up, and prompt refinement. Multi-turn conversations account for 33.2% of the conversations shared in PRs and 36.9% in issues. (3) In collaborative coding, developers leverage shared conversations with ChatGPT to facilitate their role-specific contributions, whether as authors of PRs or issues, code reviewers, or collaborators on issues. Our work serves as the first step towards understanding the dynamics between developers and ChatGPT in collaborative software development and opens up new directions for future research on the topic.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 15, 2024

SPILLage: Agentic Oversharing on the Web

LLM-powered agents are beginning to automate user's tasks across the open web, often with access to user resources such as emails and calendars. Unlike standard LLMs answering questions in a controlled ChatBot setting, web agents act "in the wild", interacting with third parties and leaving behind an action trace. Therefore, we ask the question: how do web agents handle user resources when accomplishing tasks on their behalf across live websites? In this paper, we formalize Natural Agentic Oversharing -- the unintentional disclosure of task-irrelevant user information through an agent trace of actions on the web. We introduce SPILLage, a framework that characterizes oversharing along two dimensions: channel (content vs. behavior) and directness (explicit vs. implicit). This taxonomy reveals a critical blind spot: while prior work focuses on text leakage, web agents also overshare behaviorally through clicks, scrolls, and navigation patterns that can be monitored. We benchmark 180 tasks on live e-commerce sites with ground-truth annotations separating task-relevant from task-irrelevant attributes. Across 1,080 runs spanning two agentic frameworks and three backbone LLMs, we demonstrate that oversharing is pervasive with behavioral oversharing dominates content oversharing by 5x. This effect persists -- and can even worsen -- under prompt-level mitigation. However, removing task-irrelevant information before execution improves task success by up to 17.9%, demonstrating that reducing oversharing improves task success. Our findings underscore that protecting privacy in web agents is a fundamental challenge, requiring a broader view of "output" that accounts for what agents do on the web, not just what they type. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/jrohsc/SPILLage.

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 19, 2024

Learning from Others, Acting for You: Cross-User Memory Sharing for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents serving different users often solve related tasks, yet separate user histories can leave reusable experience inaccessible to other agents. Pooling memories expands access but risks transferring preferences that conflict with the receiving user's requirements. We introduce ShareMem, a memory architecture that shares reusable experience while grounding its application in the receiving user's own preferences. Shared experiences indicate how to act and which preferences to consult; the receiving user's memory supplies their concrete values. Two-stage consolidation refines experience locally before integrating accepted edits into a shared pool. During execution, scope-first retrieval jointly selects local and shared experiences under a common entry budget, while a user-bound channel supports initial and agent-initiated preference retrieval. We evaluate ShareMem across web navigation (Mind2Web), online personalized interaction (VitaBench~2.0), and multi-session coding (MemoryCode) with four backbone models. It improves step success, average task success, and dialogue-macro coding scores, respectively, over matched user-local memory across all four models. Ablations favor two-stage consolidation for smaller shared pools, lower induction token usage, and better downstream performance, and support complementarity between experience guidance and active preference retrieval. Further analyses show that sharing helps most when relevant local experience is scarce, while source quality and cross-user preference interference limit useful transfer.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 25

The Missing Temporal Link: Temporal Context Routing for Script-Driven Audio-Video Generation

Joint audio-video generation models have made substantial progress in visual quality and audio-visual synchronization. However, they still provide limited control over when shot transitions occur and dialogue is spoken. This limitation constrains their application in script-driven content creation, where timing errors can undermine narrative coherence and the viewing experience. Current joint generators align video and audio representations on a shared temporal axis, yet the precise timing of shots and dialogue specified in a structured prompt is encoded only in the prompt's text representation and remains unaligned with the temporal coordinates of either modality. Consequently, video and audio may remain synchronized with each other while both fail to follow the script timeline. This mismatch motivates us to extend temporal alignment beyond video and audio to include the structured script. We therefore introduce Temporal Context Routing (TCR), which maps the script timing onto the shared temporal axis of video and audio generation and routes each prompt's guidance to the corresponding positions in both modalities. Compared with the baseline on 200 test scripts, TCR reduces Shot Boundary MAE by 96%, from 1.11 s to 0.042 s, and raises Dialogue Acc@0.5 s from 28.3% to 84.1%. TCR achieves these improvements while maintaining visual quality and audio-visual synchronization comparable to those of the baselines. A user study further shows that participants prefer TCR on all five evaluated dimensions.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 1 2

APEX-Harm: Evaluating Agent Safety in Shared Professional Workspaces

Professional agents increasingly work through command-line interfaces and multiple tools over shared workspaces containing files, messages, and business applications. These environments create safety risks that are difficult to capture with attacks placed at a single, known read location. We introduce APEX-Harm, a benchmark for evaluating prompt and script injection against long-horizon agents performing finance, consulting, and legal tasks in large workspaces. Each task contains 115 to 328 files, together with email, calendar, chat, document, spreadsheet, PDF, and code-execution tools exposed through MCP servers. The benchmark includes six attack categories covering static and dynamic injections, task-specific script replacement, and attacker-provided generic scripts, and evaluates attack success, exposure, and task performance. We evaluate 12 frontier models on 180 task instances per model. Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 have the lowest overall attack success rates (8% and 20%), while task-specific script replacement and attacker-provided generic script attacks remain substantially more effective, averaging 81-84% and 73% attack success, respectively. Gemini 3.8 Flash achieves the highest mean task score (0.877) while still exhibiting a 33% attack success rate. These results show that completing the requested task is not sufficient evidence of safe behavior: an agent can produce a correct deliverable while also performing an unauthorized action in the workspace.

Labtune: Treating Lab Organization and Information Sharing as Experimental Variables in LLM-Agent Discovery

De-siloing can create groupthink; silos can prevent knowledge sharing and reduce research efficiency. The same tension appears in research systems built with large language model (LLM) agents, yet their organization is usually fixed by design. I propose treating laboratory structure and information sharing as experimental variables. I introduce Labtune, an open framework for bounded research workflows with user-selected laboratory organization, communication policy, model configuration and budget. Users can choose among six editable designs, from multidisciplinary silos and transdisciplinary teams to co-leaders, hub-and-spoke structures, flat co-labs and a single scientist. Information sharing can independently vary from none to high detail, with an optional channel for conditional abstractions called wisdom. Sharing is enforced by the controller at phase barriers rather than through unrestricted agent chat, while delegation does not create additional budget or permissions. Development evidence is separated from protected confirmation, and an optional multi-lab layer allows laboratories with different structures to exchange filtered information. Labtune is an idea and system-description paper, not a benchmark result. Its contribution is to make laboratory organization and information sharing configurable and measurable under matched budgets. I do not claim that one design or level of sharing is best; the aim is to create a concrete experimental space in which those differences can be tested.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 2

Skill Constellations: Tracing the Supply Chain of Agent Skills on GitHub

Agent skills are SKILL.md instructions and scripts that AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex run with the permissions of their user. Developers share skills by copying them between repositories, which makes them a software supply chain without a registry, versions or provenance. The origin of a copied skill, the reach of a security fix and the repositories that warrant review are therefore unknown. Studies that record which repositories hold a skill at a single point in time cannot reveal who copied it from whom. We contribute the first dated copy network of agent skills, built from the git history of every SKILL.md in GitSkills and covering 2,193,119 skill adoptions across GitHub, together with an interactive viewer. A few repositories are the source of almost all copies, and GitHub stars do not identify them. Skill copies almost never change with their source, and a fix at the source therefore rarely reaches them. We fit a model of which repositories others copy from and use it to rank repositories for audit. Reviewing the 100 repositories it ranks highest prevents 14.9% of later adoptions of high-risk skills, against 0.5% for the 100 most starred, which gives security engineers a short list to check before a skill spreads. Platforms should therefore distribute versioned references rather than copies. Project Website: https://fahdseddik.github.io/Skill-Constellations/

Automated Movie Generation via Multi-Agent CoT Planning

Existing long-form video generation frameworks lack automated planning, requiring manual input for storylines, scenes, cinematography, and character interactions, resulting in high costs and inefficiencies. To address these challenges, we present MovieAgent, an automated movie generation via multi-agent Chain of Thought (CoT) planning. MovieAgent offers two key advantages: 1) We firstly explore and define the paradigm of automated movie/long-video generation. Given a script and character bank, our MovieAgent can generates multi-scene, multi-shot long-form videos with a coherent narrative, while ensuring character consistency, synchronized subtitles, and stable audio throughout the film. 2) MovieAgent introduces a hierarchical CoT-based reasoning process to automatically structure scenes, camera settings, and cinematography, significantly reducing human effort. By employing multiple LLM agents to simulate the roles of a director, screenwriter, storyboard artist, and location manager, MovieAgent streamlines the production pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that MovieAgent achieves new state-of-the-art results in script faithfulness, character consistency, and narrative coherence. Our hierarchical framework takes a step forward and provides new insights into fully automated movie generation. The code and project website are available at: https://github.com/showlab/MovieAgent and https://weijiawu.github.io/MovieAgent.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 2

WideSWE: Can Coding Agents Coordinate Changes Across Repositories?

Coding-agent evaluation has progressed from resolving individual issues to carrying out long-horizon development, yet task completion is still largely assessed within a single codebase. In software ecosystems, many features and bug fixes require coordinated changes across multiple repositories. We introduce WideSWE to evaluate coding agents on such cross-repository tasks. Mining and reviewing changes across 103 software ecosystems yields 120 real-world tasks, balanced between 60 bug fixes and 60 features. We derive prompts from related issues and pull requests. We systematically review and adapt hidden tests to support diverse correct implementations while preserving required behavior and regression checks. Across seven agent configurations, full task success ranges from 10.83% to 42.50%, with the configuration pairing Codex CLI with GPT-5.6-sol achieving the highest rate. Trajectories show agents failing to identify necessary changes, recognizing changes but leaving them unfinished, or modifying the required repositories without fully satisfying the request. To examine whether working on one repository at a time can alleviate these difficulties, we compare it with joint execution under identical prompts. Independent execution mainly recovers omitted work and is less effective at correcting previously attempted but unsuccessful implementations. Joint execution can use information from related repositories to guide implementation and verification. Code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-ACES-ISE/WideSWE.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26 3

CollabStory: Multi-LLM Collaborative Story Generation and Authorship Analysis

The rise of unifying frameworks that enable seamless interoperability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made LLM-LLM collaboration for open-ended tasks a possibility. Despite this, there have not been efforts to explore such collaborative writing. We take the next step beyond human-LLM collaboration to explore this multi-LLM scenario by generating the first exclusively LLM-generated collaborative stories dataset called CollabStory. We focus on single-author (N=1) to multi-author (up to N=5) scenarios, where multiple LLMs co-author stories. We generate over 32k stories using open-source instruction-tuned LLMs. Further, we take inspiration from the PAN tasks that have set the standard for human-human multi-author writing tasks and analysis. We extend their authorship-related tasks for multi-LLM settings and present baselines for LLM-LLM collaboration. We find that current baselines are not able to handle this emerging scenario. Thus, CollabStory is a resource that could help propel an understanding as well as the development of techniques to discern the use of multiple LLMs. This is crucial to study in the context of writing tasks since LLM-LLM collaboration could potentially overwhelm ongoing challenges related to plagiarism detection, credit assignment, maintaining academic integrity in educational settings, and addressing copyright infringement concerns. We make our dataset and code available at \url{https://github.com/saranya-venkatraman/multi_llm_story_writing}.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 18, 2024

Sharing State Between Prompts and Programs

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced a new type of programming: natural language programming. By writing prompts that direct LLMs to perform natural language processing, code generation, reasoning, etc., users are writing code in natural language -- natural language code -- for the LLM to execute. An emerging area of research enables interoperability between natural language code and formal languages such as Python. We present a novel programming abstraction, shared program state, that removes the manual work required to enable interoperability between natural language code and program state. With shared program state, programmers can write natural code that directly writes program variables, computes with program objects, and implements control flow in the program. We present a schema for specifying natural function interfaces that extend programming systems to support natural code and leverage this schema to specify shared program state as a natural function interface. We implement shared program state in the Nightjar programming system. Nightjar enables programmers to write Python programs that contain natural code that shares the Python program state. We show that Nightjar programs achieve comparable or higher task accuracy than manually written implementations (+4-19%), while decreasing the lines of code by 39.6% on average. The tradeoff to using Nightjar is that it may incur runtime overhead (0.4-4.3x runtime of manual implementations).

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025 1

Vlogger: Make Your Dream A Vlog

In this work, we present Vlogger, a generic AI system for generating a minute-level video blog (i.e., vlog) of user descriptions. Different from short videos with a few seconds, vlog often contains a complex storyline with diversified scenes, which is challenging for most existing video generation approaches. To break through this bottleneck, our Vlogger smartly leverages Large Language Model (LLM) as Director and decomposes a long video generation task of vlog into four key stages, where we invoke various foundation models to play the critical roles of vlog professionals, including (1) Script, (2) Actor, (3) ShowMaker, and (4) Voicer. With such a design of mimicking human beings, our Vlogger can generate vlogs through explainable cooperation of top-down planning and bottom-up shooting. Moreover, we introduce a novel video diffusion model, ShowMaker, which serves as a videographer in our Vlogger for generating the video snippet of each shooting scene. By incorporating Script and Actor attentively as textual and visual prompts, it can effectively enhance spatial-temporal coherence in the snippet. Besides, we design a concise mixed training paradigm for ShowMaker, boosting its capacity for both T2V generation and prediction. Finally, the extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot T2V generation and prediction tasks. More importantly, Vlogger can generate over 5-minute vlogs from open-world descriptions, without loss of video coherence on script and actor. The code and model is all available at https://github.com/zhuangshaobin/Vlogger.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

When Agents Coordinate: Measuring Coordination in Multi-Agent AI Coding

We study how teams of AI coding agents coordinate while solving programming tasks. Current evaluations usually report whether the agents complete the task and how much the run costs, leaving the coordination inside the team largely unmeasured. We introduce an instrument to measure this coordination. Each run is represented as a temporal network in which agents and files are nodes, and messages, file writes, and file reads are timestamped directed edges with an associated cost. We apply this instrument to 1902 runs, each evaluated with a fixed test suite, across configurations that vary the team size, the team structure, and the file policy. The resulting networks show how coordination changes as teams grow and as the work changes. Direct messaging initially increases close to quadratically with the number of agents, with much of this growth coming from an early round of introductions. As the teams grow further, this increase levels off in the largest teams we study, where agents increasingly communicate through broadcast messages. The task also shapes the network that emerges. Work built around a shared specification produces dense, highly connected teams, while pipeline tasks produce sparse networks organised around local interfaces. Shared files can replace repeated 1-to-1 communication, cutting output tokens by about 42% at eight agents on message-heavy work, while adding overhead when files already carry the coordination. Naming one agent as coordinator creates no communication hub and provides no reliable improvement in success. We also observe an unprompted tendency for agents to seek out hidden grading material. We repeat the key experimental conditions in a sealed environment, replacing the hidden material with marked placeholder files. Across 244 additional runs, agents still reach for it in four fifths of runs, while the coordinator and file-channel findings reproduce.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 16

ASIL: Replacing Screenshot-and-Click with Structured State and Semantic Actions

Powerful code agents can execute scripts, call tools, and manage files, yet many important applications remain accessible primarily through graphical user interfaces. We argue that screenshot-and-click is an inefficient interface for software-operating agents: screenshots are state-incomplete, and GUI actions are brittle, semantically weak, and poorly matched to long-horizon planning. We introduce ASIL (Agent-Software Interaction Layer), an agent-native interface that exposes software through structured JSON observations and code-executable semantic actions, realized through the deepest feasible access path for each application. We instantiate ASIL across 15 applications and a benchmark of 300 single-application and 80 multi-application tasks. ASIL reaches above 80 with closed models while executing fewer than five actions per task. Under a repaired runtime and a 50-step screenshot budget, the same tasks yield 6.6 and 26.6 strict success under screenshot-and-click control, rising to 15.0 and 53.3 on an easier OSWorld-comparable band. Against application-native interfaces on matched tasks, ASIL exceeds LibreOffice's UNO API by 28-38 strict points but only matches draw.io's MCP content contract. The structured modality also suits training: small-scale SFT raises Qwen3.5-2B from 58.0 to 72.1 and Qwen3.5-9B from 66.6 to 80.4, and resource-limited on-policy RL further raises them to 74.4 and 82.2.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 26

SkillFusion: Towards Reliable Multi-Skill Composition for LLM Agents

Independently authored skills can impose incompatible requirements, competing preferences, and redundant instructions when jointly loaded by an LLM agent. We propose SkillFusion, an offline compiler that reconciles these interactions into a reusable merged skill. Its central idea is to make composition decisions explicit through typed, scoped constraints linked to their source directives. A type-scope gate selects candidate interactions, while selective fallback revisits pairs potentially missed by structural pruning. A classifier identifies interaction types, and an adversarial verifier re-examines uncertain judgments. The resolver applies conditional routing or explicit priorities to hard conflicts, verified abstraction to soft conflicts, and deduplication to redundant instructions. Source-linked checks guide synthesis and compression, and metadata synthesis supports discovery of the merged skill. The resulting artifact retains associated scripts and resources and can be reused across tasks and executor models. SkillFusion achieves the highest mean Success among evaluated non-oracle methods on all three agent benchmarks and on both transfer benchmarks across three executor models. At the largest tested instruction configurations, it achieves over 2.5 times the Success of unresolved multi-skill loading, highlighting the growing value of reconciliation as composition becomes more demanding. The code will be open-sourced after the review process concludes.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 10

Harvesting SWE Benchmarks from Wild Vibe Coding Sessions

Development teams need reproducible tasks from their own repositories and workflows to evaluate coding agents. Conversational developer-agent collaboration ("vibe coding") produces abundant coding sessions and repository checkpoints, but requirements evolve across turns, unrelated conversations co-occur with commits, and engineering efforts can span multiple sessions. We present SessionFarmer, an automated framework that turns these records into self-contained, executable software engineering tasks. It analyzes dialogue and commit history to filter unrelated sessions and group multi-turn, potentially multi-session interactions into work episodes centered on one engineering goal. For each episode, it reconstructs a hermetic execution container, synthesizes a task statement from the full context, and authors repository-grounded engineering-quality rubrics and unit tests. Closed-loop test refinement uses requirement-breaking mutants and a blind solver to reduce false rejections of valid alternatives and false acceptances of incomplete solutions. We construct CropChat, an open benchmark of 242 tasks across 61 public repositories and 14 programming languages, and CropEnterprise from proprietary enterprise logs. In a CropEnterprise audit, the original developers endorse the vast majority of reconstructed episode boundaries, task statements, and quality rubrics. Full-episode context covers substantially more user requirements than single-turn or single-session inputs. Test refinement cuts false-rejection rates and raises balanced accuracy against reference patch labels by 7-9 percentage points across solvers. Across 12 model-harness configurations on CropChat, the strongest setup achieves 39.3% Pass@1, while harness choice shifts Pass@1 by up to 8.4 percentage points for the same model.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 1

An Exploratory Literature Study on Sharing and Energy Use of Language Models for Source Code

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 5, 2023

Names Are Not Objects: Object-Bound Confinement for Compromised AI Coding Agents

Coding agents read repositories and web pages that anyone can write, and then act with their user's authority. Prompt-injection defenses make it less likely that the model is steered but do not prevent it, so the system around the model must contain an agent that is already compromised. Many exploits against deployed coding agents share one cause: a check approves a name, such as a path, an argument vector, or a directory, and a later step maps that name to a different object: the file behind a symlink, the behavior an option selects, or a repository that git discovers on its own. We present Zero-Trust Agent Cells (ZTAC). A cell runs the agent in a kernel sandbox whose only route to files, programs, and the network is a socket to a broker. The broker resolves each request to the object it will act on, decides on that object, and checks at use that it is acting on the object it authorized. Programs that the broker starts run in a sandbox compiled from the same policy, and approvals are bound to the resolved object and can be used once. Our macOS prototype has 3.2k lines of trusted Rust code, excluding dependencies. We evaluate it against 74 attacks with ground-truth oracles, including replays of 10 publicly disclosed incidents. A tool allowlist loses 66 of them, and an allowlist combined with the kind of command sandbox that deployed agents use loses 56. ZTAC loses 2, both of which encode a secret into traffic to an allowed endpoint, and holds 14 for review. It completes 43 of 46 benign operations, with 8 approval prompts, and 4 of 7 workflows. A no-op brokered request has a median latency of 4.0 ms, and the spawned programs we measured take 8.5 ms to 18.4 ms longer than without ZTAC.

  • 1 authors
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Oct 9

One Sentence, One Drama: Personalized Short-Form Drama Generation via Multi-Agent Systems

Existing approaches for digital short-drama production typically rely on one-shot LLM generated scripts and loosely coupled pipelines, which fail to satisfy three key requirements of short-drama generation: (1) narrative pacing, resulting in weak hooks, insufficient escalation, and unattractive endings; (2) spatial consistency, leading to drifting scene layouts and inconsistent character positions across clips; and (3) production-level quality control, requiring extensive manual review and correction across script and visual stages. We present One Sentence, One Drama, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that transforms a user's single-sentence idea into a fully produced short drama through structured intermediate modules and iterative refinement. Our approach is built upon three key components: (1) a multi-agent debate-based story generation module that enforces short-drama pacing and narrative coherence; (2) a 3D-grounded first-frame generation mechanism that establishes a shared spatial reference for consistent character positioning and scene layout across clips; and (3) multi-stage reviewer loops that perform comprehensive error detection and targeted revision across script, visual, and video generation stages. We also introduce scene-level BGM matching and scene transition planning to improve the audience's immersive experience. To systematically evaluate this task, we introduce Short-Drama-Bench, a benchmark that extends standard video quality metrics with short-drama-specific criteria. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing pipelines in narrative quality, cross-clip consistency, and overall viewing experience.

TransliCo: A Contrastive Learning Framework to Address the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models

The world's more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.

  • 4 authors
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Jan 12, 2024

Multi-Agent Software Development through Cross-Team Collaboration

The latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), eg., ChatDev, have catalyzed profound transformations, particularly through multi-agent collaboration for software development. LLM agents can collaborate in teams like humans, and follow the waterfall model to sequentially work on requirements analysis, development, review, testing, and other phases to perform autonomous software generation. However, for an agent team, each phase in a single development process yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently, this may lead to obtaining suboptimal results. To address this challenge, we introduce Cross-Team Collaboration (CTC), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various decisions and communicate with their insights in a cross-team collaboration environment for superior content generation. Experimental results in software development reveal a notable increase in quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring the efficacy of our framework. The significant improvements in story generation demonstrate the promising generalization ability of our framework across various domains. We anticipate that our work will guide LLM agents towards a cross-team paradigm and contribute to their significant growth in but not limited to software development. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 13, 2024

String: An Agentic OS Where Every App Is a Markdown File

LLM agents have become a new class of software user, but every surface they work through was designed for someone else. Pages are built for human eyes, which can skim and ignore; tool schemas for programs, which pay nothing to carry definitions they never call. An agent has neither luxury: it re-reads, and pays again for, everything it is shown on every turn. We present String, an open-source runtime that gives this user an interface of its own and treats the job as an operating-systems problem. Tool knowledge moves out of the agent's context and into a common layer that renders it back one view at a time as Markdown. A single SFMD (String-Flavored Markdown) document declares an application's views, typed actions, navigation, and credentials, and the runtime handles discovery, validation, execution, state, and secrets behind two core verbs: /open to see and /act to do. Web and app turn out to be two renderings of one architecture: an SFMD site serves styled HTML to browsers and the raw document to agents, so one grammar reaches apps, files, shells, and the web, even legacy HTML, with no per-site integration. Views stay partial by design, and the staging is causal: disclosing one tier of detail a single turn too early costs up to 23 accuracy points, while proper staging drops wrong-action selection from 28% to 2%. Privilege follows provenance: a remote page may call HTTP but never the shell, and caller-supplied text never expands a stored secret. On an 87-task benchmark that pairs each task with curated skills, operationalizing those procedures as on-demand String apps yields comparable aggregate success across six models from frontier to small (+1.3pp) while using 33.5% fewer tokens among completed episodes, and the resident interface stays a constant 53 tokens at any catalog size. We report the design, the evaluation, and what three months of production use taught us.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 27

AgentRadio: Passive Awareness for Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Collaboration

Understanding large codebases is a long-horizon task for Large Language Model (LLM) agents: answering a single question can require building and running the software, tracing execution across files, and synthesizing evidence over tens of minutes. On SWE-Atlas QnA, a benchmark of long-horizon questions over production repositories, a single Claude Code agent (Opus 4.6) resolves only 32.3% of tasks. Dividing the work among agents with clean contexts mitigates this limitation. However, the subtasks of code comprehension are interdependent. One agent's findings can rewrite another's task, so agents must coordinate during execution, not only at phase boundaries. Existing multi-agent systems support such exchange only between phases, through staged handoffs or synchronized rounds. Communication and work remain mutually exclusive. A discovery made mid-execution cannot be shared until the next boundary. We present AgentRadio, an asynchronous message-passing layer that equips coding-agent harnesses with three primitives: threads, messages, and waiting for mentions. The last runs as a background task, surfacing teammates' messages without interrupting foreground work, so each agent remains passively aware of its peers and folds new findings into its ongoing task. Under a five-phase protocol of division of labor and negotiation, four agents organized by AgentRadio resolve 62.1% of tasks, 29.8 points above a single agent and above Claude Code with the newer Opus 4.8 (57.2%). Rubric-level analysis shows the gain growing with task difficulty, consistent with mid-course correction as the underlying mechanism. Our code is available at https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/AgentRadio.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 30

Characterising Open Source Co-opetition in Company-hosted Open Source Software Projects: The Cases of PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Transformers

Companies, including market rivals, have long collaborated on the development of open source software (OSS), resulting in a tangle of co-operation and competition known as "open source co-opetition". While prior work investigates open source co-opetition in OSS projects that are hosted by vendor-neutral foundations, we have a limited understanding thereof in OSS projects that are hosted and governed by one company. Given their prevalence, it is timely to investigate open source co-opetition in such contexts. Towards this end, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of three company-hosted OSS projects in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry: Meta's PyTorch (prior to its donation to the Linux Foundation), Google's TensorFlow, and Hugging Face's Transformers. We contribute three key findings. First, while the projects exhibit similar code authorship patterns between host and external companies (80%/20% of commits), collaborations are structured differently (e.g., decentralised vs. hub-and-spoke networks). Second, host and external companies engage in strategic, non-strategic, and contractual collaborations, with varying incentives and collaboration practices. Some of the observed collaborations are specific to the AI industry (e.g., hardware-software optimizations or AI model integrations), while others are typical of the broader software industry (e.g., bug fixing or task outsourcing). Third, single-vendor governance creates a power imbalance that influences open source co-opetition practices and possibilities, from the host company's singular decision-making power (e.g., the risk of license change) to their community involvement strategy (e.g., from over-control to over-delegation). We conclude with recommendations for future research.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 23, 2024

Should ChatGPT and Bard Share Revenue with Their Data Providers? A New Business Model for the AI Era

With various AI tools such as ChatGPT becoming increasingly popular, we are entering a true AI era. We can foresee that exceptional AI tools will soon reap considerable profits. A crucial question arise: should AI tools share revenue with their training data providers in additional to traditional stakeholders and shareholders? The answer is Yes. Large AI tools, such as large language models, always require more and better quality data to continuously improve, but current copyright laws limit their access to various types of data. Sharing revenue between AI tools and their data providers could transform the current hostile zero-sum game relationship between AI tools and a majority of copyrighted data owners into a collaborative and mutually beneficial one, which is necessary to facilitate the development of a virtuous cycle among AI tools, their users and data providers that drives forward AI technology and builds a healthy AI ecosystem. However, current revenue-sharing business models do not work for AI tools in the forthcoming AI era, since the most widely used metrics for website-based traffic and action, such as clicks, will be replaced by new metrics such as prompts and cost per prompt for generative AI tools. A completely new revenue-sharing business model, which must be almost independent of AI tools and be easily explained to data providers, needs to establish a prompt-based scoring system to measure data engagement of each data provider. This paper systematically discusses how to build such a scoring system for all data providers for AI tools based on classification and content similarity models, and outlines the requirements for AI tools or third parties to build it. Sharing revenue with data providers using such a scoring system would encourage more data owners to participate in the revenue-sharing program. This will be a utilitarian AI era where all parties benefit.

  • 1 authors
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May 4, 2023

SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure

Self-evolving agents accumulate reusable skills by appending successful procedures and failure fixes. Over time, the same requirement is often restated in several branches, examples, and warnings, while common action sequences are copied rather than reused. The resulting skill becomes expensive to inject and difficult to maintain. Generic prompt compression is ill-suited to this setting because a skill is not a flat passage: its name and description define when it applies, its workflow controls execution, its tool and output contracts constrain validity, and rare exceptions may remain essential even when no sampled task activates them. Evaluation-guided compression can test these behaviors, but it introduces rollouts, cost, and dependence on the compression-time evaluation set. We present SkillZip, an evaluation-free method that compresses a skill by finding its shortest faithful structural explanation. The intuition is explain once, reference many: state a repeated rule once at the scope where it applies, factor a repeated action sequence into a shared procedure, and keep only the differences as explicit exceptions. We formalize this intuition as a typed minimum description-length objective over a skill contract and a residual, subject to a hard coverage constraint for every extracted trigger, workflow edge, tool requirement, obligation, and output field. The formulation provides simple sharing thresholds, preserves unique rare rules by construction, and supports efficient local updates. SkillZip has a one-shot mode with one structured extraction call and deterministic optimization, and a continual Zip-on-Write mode that integrates each self-evolution patch without replaying tasks or reparsing the full history. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of SkillZip in compression performance, generalizability, and cost overhead.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 10 1

Language Server CLI Empowers Language Agents with Process Rewards

Large language models routinely hallucinate APIs and mislocalize edits, while language servers compute verified, IDE-grade facts about real code. We present Lanser-CLI, a CLI-first orchestration layer that pins and mediates a Language Server Protocol (LSP) server for coding agents and CI, exposing deterministic, replayable workflows. Our position is that language servers provide not only structural information (definitions, references, types, diagnostics) but also an actionable process reward: machine-checked, step-wise signals that align an agent's planning loop with program reality. In this work, Lanser-CLI contributes: (i) a robust addressing scheme beyond brittle "file:line:col" via a Selector DSL (symbolic, AST-path, and content-anchored selectors) with a principled relocation algorithm; (ii) deterministic Analysis Bundles that normalize Language Server responses and capture environment/capability metadata with stable content hashes; (iii) a safety envelope for mutating operations (rename, code actions) with preview, workspace jails, and Git-aware, transactional apply; and (iv) a process-reward functional derived from Language Server facts (diagnostic deltas, disambiguation confidence, and safe-apply checks) that is computable online and replayable offline. We formalize determinism under frozen snapshots and establish a monotonicity property for the process reward, making it suitable for process supervision and counterfactual analysis. Project Page: https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/lanser-cli

  • 2 authors
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Oct 26, 2025 1

SWE-Touch: Benchmarking Coding Agents When Users Touch the Code

Real-world software development requires coding agents to operate in shared workspaces where users may inspect and modify code during an ongoing task, yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate agents working alone or restrict user participation to messages. This leads us to ask: how do coding agents understand and respond to code changes in a shared workspace? We introduce SWE-Touch, a framework that stress-tests this setting through validated Counter-Edits: plausible edits to task-relevant code that conflict with task completion. SWE-Touch mines task-critical regions from multiple repair trajectories, uses a separate User Patch Generator to construct the edits, and injects them with contextual user messages when agents reach the relevant code. We evaluate nine coding models on SWE-bench Verified, with additional experiments on longer-horizon tasks from SWE-Bench Pro and DeepSWE. Counter-Edit lowers average resolve rate by 7.7 percentage points on SWE-bench Verified, with degradation also persisting on both longer-horizon benchmarks. Trajectory analysis links these failures to limited awareness of the evolving workspace: agents may retain conflicting code or replace it without sufficiently re-inspecting the repository and validating the revised code with targeted tests. These findings show that strong autonomous performance does not yet ensure the state awareness and adaptive behavior needed for shared-workspace collaboration, and point to detecting workspace changes, reconciling conflicting edits with the task, and verifying the affected behavior as key capabilities for future optimization.

A Systematic Literature Review of Software Engineering Research on Jupyter Notebook

Context: Jupyter Notebook has emerged as a versatile tool that transforms how researchers, developers, and data scientists conduct and communicate their work. As the adoption of Jupyter notebooks continues to rise, so does the interest from the software engineering research community in improving the software engineering practices for Jupyter notebooks. Objective: The purpose of this study is to analyze trends, gaps, and methodologies used in software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks. Method: We selected 146 relevant publications from the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography up to the end of 2024, following established systematic literature review guidelines. We explored publication trends, categorized them based on software engineering topics, and reported findings based on those topics. Results: The most popular venues for publishing software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks are related to human-computer interaction instead of traditional software engineering venues. Researchers have addressed a wide range of software engineering topics on notebooks, such as code reuse, readability, and execution environment. Although reusability is one of the research topics for Jupyter notebooks, only 64 of the 146 studies can be reused based on their provided URLs. Additionally, most replication packages are not hosted on permanent repositories for long-term availability and adherence to open science principles. Conclusion: Solutions specific to notebooks for software engineering issues, including testing, refactoring, and documentation, are underexplored. Future research opportunities exist in automatic testing frameworks, refactoring clones between notebooks, and generating group documentation for coherent code cells.

  • 3 authors
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Apr 22, 2025

MDIW-13: a New Multi-Lingual and Multi-Script Database and Benchmark for Script Identification

Script identification plays a vital role in applications that involve handwriting and document analysis within a multi-script and multi-lingual environment. Moreover, it exhibits a profound connection with human cognition. This paper provides a new database for benchmarking script identification algorithms, which contains both printed and handwritten documents collected from a wide variety of scripts, such as Arabic, Bengali (Bangla), Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Devanagari, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Roman, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. The dataset consists of 1,135 documents scanned from local newspaper and handwritten letters as well as notes from different native writers. Further, these documents are segmented into lines and words, comprising a total of 13,979 and 86,655 lines and words, respectively, in the dataset. Easy-to-go benchmarks are proposed with handcrafted and deep learning methods. The benchmark includes results at the document, line, and word levels with printed and handwritten documents. Results of script identification independent of the document/line/word level and independent of the printed/handwritten letters are also given. The new multi-lingual database is expected to create new script identifiers, present various challenges, including identifying handwritten and printed samples and serve as a foundation for future research in script identification based on the reported results of the three benchmarks.

  • 6 authors
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May 29, 2024

DramaChain Bench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Short-Drama Generation

Commercial short-drama production follows a multi-stage chain: script, storyboard, keyframe imagery, shot-level video, and the finished short drama. Most existing benchmarks evaluate solely the video-generation stage using pre-authored inputs instead of real upstream pipeline outputs. This leaves two critical questions unanswerable: whether each stage adheres to the original script intent (rather than only its immediate input prompt), and whether disparate shots remain coherent after assembly into multi-episode releases. We present DramaChain Bench, the first short-drama benchmark that evaluates every stage of the complete production chain. It is built upon three in-house systems sharing one dimension system, DramaChain Dimensions: five evaluation axes instantiated at every stage, resolving into 63 leaf dimensions. DramaChain Agent is calibrated against commercial short-drama platforms in both workflow and finished short-drama quality, enabling stage-wise fair comparison across models. DramaChain Labeling System has each of the 5,785 items scored independently by three professional annotators, with all defects spatio-temporally localised and selected from a predefined defect list. This process produces 17,488 valid scores and 255,925 traceable attribution records. The human annotations confirm that upstream defects cascade across the pipeline, demonstrating that final episode quality is not governed by video generation alone. DramaChain Agentic Judge then scores every leaf dimension automatically, gathering evidence over multiple agentic rounds before judging against a per-item checklist; it reproduces the model ranking at a mean PLCC of 0.918, enough to admit new models at no annotation cost.

Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating "branching". In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27, 2023

Enabling more efficient and cost-effective AI/ML systems with Collective Mind, virtualized MLOps, MLPerf, Collective Knowledge Playground and reproducible optimization tournaments

This white paper introduces my educational community initiative to learn how to run AI, ML and other emerging workloads in the most efficient and cost-effective way across diverse models, data sets, software and hardware. This project leverages Collective Mind (CM), virtualized MLOps and DevOps (CM4MLOps), MLPerf benchmarks, and the Collective Knowledge playground (CK), which I have developed in collaboration with the community and MLCommons. I created Collective Mind as a small and portable Python package with minimal dependencies, a unified CLI and Python API to help researchers and engineers automate repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming tasks. I also designed CM as a distributed framework, continuously enhanced by the community through the CM4* repositories, which function as the unified interface for organizing and managing various collections of automations and artifacts. For example, CM4MLOps repository includes many automations, also known as CM scripts, to streamline the process of building, running, benchmarking, and optimizing AI, ML, and other workflows across ever-evolving models, data, and systems. I donated CK, CM and CM4MLOps to MLCommons to foster collaboration between academia and industry to learn how to co-design more efficient and cost-effective AI systems while capturing and encoding knowledge within Collective Mind, protecting intellectual property, enabling portable skills, and accelerating the transition of the state-of-the-art research into production. My ultimate goal is to collaborate with the community to complete my two-decade journey toward creating self-optimizing software and hardware that can automatically learn how to run any workload in the most efficient and cost-effective manner based on user requirements and constraints such as cost, latency, throughput, accuracy, power consumption, size, and other critical factors.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

An Empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Python Packages and Their Detection

In the rapidly evolving software development landscape, Python stands out for its simplicity, versatility, and extensive ecosystem. Python packages, as units of organization, reusability, and distribution, have become a pressing concern, highlighted by the considerable number of vulnerability reports. As a scripting language, Python often cooperates with other languages for performance or interoperability. This adds complexity to the vulnerabilities inherent to Python packages, and the effectiveness of current vulnerability detection tools remains underexplored. This paper addresses these gaps by introducing PyVul, the first comprehensive benchmark suite of Python-package vulnerabilities. PyVul includes 1,157 publicly reported, developer-verified vulnerabilities, each linked to its affected packages. To accommodate diverse detection techniques, it provides annotations at both commit and function levels. An LLM-assisted data cleansing method is incorporated to improve label accuracy, achieving 100% commit-level and 94% function-level accuracy, establishing PyVul as the most precise large-scale Python vulnerability benchmark. We further carry out a distribution analysis of PyVul, which demonstrates that vulnerabilities in Python packages involve multiple programming languages and exhibit a wide variety of types. Moreover, our analysis reveals that multi-lingual Python packages are potentially more susceptible to vulnerabilities. Evaluation of state-of-the-art detectors using this benchmark reveals a significant discrepancy between the capabilities of existing tools and the demands of effectively identifying real-world security issues in Python packages. Additionally, we conduct an empirical review of the top-ranked CWEs observed in Python packages, to diagnose the fine-grained limitations of current detection tools and highlight the necessity for future advancements in the field.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4, 2025

PyGen: A Collaborative Human-AI Approach to Python Package Creation

The principles of automation and innovation serve as foundational elements for advancement in contemporary science and technology. Here, we introduce Pygen, an automation platform designed to empower researchers, technologists, and hobbyists to bring abstract ideas to life as core, usable software tools written in Python. Pygen leverages the immense power of autoregressive large language models to augment human creativity during the ideation, iteration, and innovation process. By combining state-of-the-art language models with open-source code generation technologies, Pygen has significantly reduced the manual overhead of tool development. From a user prompt, Pygen automatically generates Python packages for a complete workflow from concept to package generation and documentation. The findings of our work show that Pygen considerably enhances the researcher's productivity by enabling the creation of resilient, modular, and well-documented packages for various specialized purposes. We employ a prompt enhancement approach to distill the user's package description into increasingly specific and actionable. While being inherently an open-ended task, we have evaluated the generated packages and the documentation using Human Evaluation, LLM-based evaluation, and CodeBLEU, with detailed results in the results section. Furthermore, we documented our results, analyzed the limitations, and suggested strategies to alleviate them. Pygen is our vision of ethical automation, a framework that promotes inclusivity, accessibility, and collaborative development. This project marks the beginning of a large-scale effort towards creating tools where intelligent agents collaborate with humans to improve scientific and technological development substantially. Our code and generated examples are open-sourced at [https://github.com/GitsSaikat/Pygen]

  • 6 authors
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Nov 12, 2024

What Open-Source Projects Tell Their Coding Agents: A Census of AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md

Coding agents can be guided with instruction files in a repository. We examine this emerging practice through a census of popular, active GitHub repositories in thirteen languages, treating each repository's root AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md as one instruction set. Agent instructions appear in of repositories and of the most-starred; where both files exist, CLAUDE.md usually points to AGENTS.md. We analyse statements using model-assisted annotation and human review. The annotations reveal a practical mix of project knowledge and rules about code, building and workflow. Collaboration rules name concrete requirements, from test plans to commit formats, yet of directives give no reason. Projects disagree on AI attribution: commit-message rules more often prohibit it than require it, while pull-request rules more often require disclosure. A third of instruction sets have a generator-associated signature, a tool-inserted block, shared text or an AI-marked creation commit; four in five are edited after creation. Prespecified tests associate repository popularity with rules on pull requests and AI contributions. Exploratory analyses link activity to process-oriented content and show that LLM and agent projects are over-represented among adopters. The models agree much more closely with each other than with the human reviewer's topic assignments, a caution for automated annotation. We release the annotations, taxonomies and pointers to the analysed file versions.

  • 1 authors
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Oct 21

Agent-Diff: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Enterprise API Tasks via Code Execution with State-Diff-Based Evaluation

We present Agent-Diff, a novel benchmarking framework for evaluating agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) on real-world tasks that execute code via external APIs. Agentic LLM performance varies due to differences in models, external tool access, prompt structures, and agentic frameworks. Benchmarks must make fundamental trade-offs between a sandboxed approach that controls for variation in software environments and more ecologically valid approaches employing real services. Agent-Diff attempts to capture the desirable features of both of these approaches by including access to the real API interfaces for software services while sandboxing the environment in which calls are made, processed, and evaluated. This approach relies on two key innovations. The first is a novel state-diff contract, which separates process from outcome - rather than fuzzy trace or parameter matching, we define task success as whether the expected change in environment state was achieved. The second is a novel sandbox that provides a standardized scripting layer that all models use to execute code against external APIs (Slack, Box, Linear, Google Calendar). Thus, we can evaluate different agentic LLMs against a standardized set of contracts using a unified sandbox while still evaluating their performance on real-world service interfaces. Using the Agent-Diff framework, we provide benchmarks for nine LLMs across 224 tasks utilizing enterprise software workflows. In addition, we evaluate the robustness of the framework with ablation experiments to assess the contribution of access to API documentation on benchmark performance. Code and data: https://github.com/agent-diff-bench/agent-diff.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 11

SyncMind: Measuring Agent Out-of-Sync Recovery in Collaborative Software Engineering

Software engineering (SE) is increasingly collaborative, with developers working together on shared complex codebases. Effective collaboration in shared environments requires participants -- whether humans or AI agents -- to stay on the same page as their environment evolves. When a collaborator's understanding diverges from the current state -- what we term the out-of-sync challenge -- the collaborator's actions may fail, leading to integration issues. In this work, we introduce SyncMind, a framework that systematically defines the out-of-sync problem faced by large language model (LLM) agents in collaborative software engineering (CSE). Based on SyncMind, we create SyncBench, a benchmark featuring 24,332 instances of agent out-of-sync scenarios in real-world CSE derived from 21 popular GitHub repositories with executable verification tests. Experiments on SyncBench uncover critical insights into existing LLM agents' capabilities and limitations. Besides substantial performance gaps among agents (from Llama-3.1 agent <= 3.33% to Claude-3.5-Sonnet >= 28.18%), their consistently low collaboration willingness (<= 4.86%) suggests fundamental limitations of existing LLM in CSE. However, when collaboration occurs, it positively correlates with out-of-sync recovery success. Minimal performance differences in agents' resource-aware out-of-sync recoveries further reveal their significant lack of resource awareness and adaptability, shedding light on future resource-efficient collaborative systems. Code and data are openly available on our project website: https://xhguo7.github.io/SyncMind/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8, 2025

HarnessSecurity-Bench: Do Security Mechanisms Really Protect Coding Agent Harnesses?

Coding agent harnesses mediate tool use and authorize actions, yet their security mechanisms and runtime effects remain incompletely characterized. We present HarnessSecurity, the first systematic empirical study and benchmark of open- and closed-source coding agent harnesses. First, we derive a ten-mechanism taxonomy and then assess 400 harness-mechanism cells using independent ratings by researchers and large language model (LLM) judges. We find that about half of confirmed mechanism implementations are opt-in, while closed-source harnesses exhibit substantial evidence gaps. Second, we introduce HarnessSecurity-Bench, a benchmark of 23 tasks across five attack surfaces without sacrificing legitimate task requirements. Using separate deterministic oracles to measure task utility and attack effects with security setting comparisons, we evaluate nine mechanisms across six leading harnesses: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, gptme, Qwen Code, and GitHub Copilot. Under a controlled LLM baseline GLM-5.2, we conduct 2,500 trials, recording 81,155 tool calls and over 2.2 billion tokens. Enabling auto-approve increases utility and raises attack success from 29.2% to 95.6%. Network isolation and read-only mode reduce attack effects with substantial utility losses, while command allowlisting and command denylisting reduce attack effects with a small utility loss and a utility gain, respectively. Task-level cases show that restrictions on a shared capability can obstruct both legitimate and malicious operations, and that allowed tools or commands can leave unauthorized operations reachable through alternative execution paths. Harness providers should make security settings verifiable, test alternative execution paths to protected operations, and assess attack effects alongside task utility and execution costs.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 9

On the Anatomy of Real-World R Code for Static Analysis

CONTEXT The R programming language has a huge and active community, especially in the area of statistical computing. Its interpreted nature allows for several interesting constructs, like the manipulation of functions at run-time, that hinder the static analysis of R programs. At the same time, there is a lack of existing research regarding how these features, or even the R language as a whole are used in practice. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we conduct a large-scale, static analysis of more than 50 million lines of real-world R programs and packages to identify their characteristics and the features that are actually used. Moreover, we compare the similarities and differences between the scripts of R users and the implementations of package authors. We provide insights for static analysis tools like the lintr package as well as potential interpreter optimizations and uncover areas for future research. METHOD We analyze 4230 R scripts submitted alongside publications and the sources of 19450 CRAN packages for over 350000 R files, collecting and summarizing quantitative information for features of interest. RESULTS We find a high frequency of name-based indexing operations, assignments, and loops, but a low frequency for most of R's reflective functions. Furthermore, we find neither testing functions nor many calls to R's foreign function interface (FFI) in the publication submissions. CONCLUSION R scripts and package sources differ, for example, in their size, the way they include other packages, and their usage of R's reflective capabilities. We provide features that are used frequently and should be prioritized by static analysis tools, like operator assignments, function calls, and certain reflective functions like load.

  • 6 authors
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Jan 29, 2024

The Balkanization of Execution-Security Research for AI Coding Agents: Isolation, Access Control, and Time-of-Check-to-Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities

AI coding agents now read repositories, call tools, and execute shell commands with limited human oversight, and a fast-growing body of work studies whether the execution layer around them is actually safe. That literature is scattered. Papers on sandbox isolation, capability and access control, policy enforcement, time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTOU) races, Model Context Protocol (MCP) threats, identity delegation, execution provenance, network egress control, and static analysis of agent-generated code are published independently and rarely cite one another. We systematize 39 papers published between 2023 and 2026 into 17 categories, each verified directly against its source. The same verification protocol also confirms four disclosed, patched CVEs directly affecting production agent harnesses. Reading across categories surfaces five cross-cutting gaps that no single paper addresses. (1) Isolation architectures and capability models are almost never evaluated against one another on a shared benchmark. (2) Policy-enforcement studies report failure rates from 69% to 98% of real denylists, yet no isolation paper re-evaluates its own defense under that adversarial setting. (3) TOCTOU and MCP threats are analyzed as separate literatures despite both being instances of the same state-validation problem. (4) Every enforcement mechanism assumes an honest policy author, leaving policy-authoring error itself unaddressed. (5) Benign but out-of-scope agent actions occurring at rates up to 17.1% under realistic prompting are addressed by no access-control or capability paper in the corpus. Existing broader surveys of agentic AI security discuss sandboxing only as one item among many defenses, leaving execution security without a dedicated systematization. This paper is written to fill that gap. We conclude with a research agenda directed at the five gaps.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 6

Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with complex tasks. In real-world software development, humans usually tackle complex tasks through collaborative teamwork, a strategy that significantly controls development complexity and enhances software quality. Inspired by this, we present a self-collaboration framework for code generation employing LLMs, exemplified by ChatGPT. Specifically, through role instructions, 1) Multiple LLMs act as distinct ``experts'', each responsible for a specific subtask within a complex task; 2) Specify the way to collaborate and interact, so that different roles form a virtual team to facilitate each other's work, ultimately the virtual team addresses code generation tasks collaboratively without the need for human intervention. To effectively organize and manage this virtual team, we incorporate software-development methodology into the framework. Thus, we assemble an elementary team consisting of three ChatGPT roles (i.e., analyst, coder, and tester) responsible for software development's analysis, coding, and testing stages. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various code-generation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that self-collaboration code generation relatively improves 29.9%-47.1% Pass@1 compared to direct code generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance and even surpassing GPT-4. Moreover, we showcase that self-collaboration could potentially enable LLMs to efficiently handle complex real-world tasks that are not readily solved by direct code generation, as evidenced in case study.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2023

AgentClick: A Skill-Based Human-in-the-Loop Review Layer for Terminal AI Agents

Recent autonomous AI agents such as Codex, and Claude Code have made it increasingly practical for users to delegate complex tasks, including writing emails, executing code, issuing shell commands, and carrying out multi-step plans. However, despite these capabilities, human-agent interaction still largely happens through terminal interfaces or remote text-based channels such as Discord. These interaction modes are often inefficient and unfriendly: long text outputs are difficult to read and review, proposed actions lack clear structure and visual context, and users must express feedback by typing detailed corrections, which is cumbersome and often discourages effective collaboration. As a result, non-expert users in particular face a high barrier to working productively with agents. To address this gap, we present AgentClick, an interactive review layer for terminal-based agents. AgentClick is implemented as a localhost npm server paired with a skill-based plugin that connects the running agent to a browser interface, allowing users to supervise and collaborate with agents through a structured web UI rather than raw terminal text alone. The system supports a range of human-in-the-loop workflows, including email drafting and revision, plan review and modification, memory management, trajectory inspection and visualization, and error localization during agent execution. It also turns code generation and execution into a reviewable process, enabling users to inspect and intervene before consequential actions are taken. In addition, AgentClick supports persistent preference capture through editable memory and remote access over HTTP, allowing users to review agents running on servers from their personal devices. Our goal is to lower the barrier for non-expert users and improve the efficiency and quality of human-agent co-work.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 14

Relic: From Multi-Agent Collaboration to Persistent Organizational Capability

Multiple agents may often conflict in an organization: for example, one coding agent changes an interface in a repository, but another continues to develop on the old version where existing tests become stale. A conversation can resolve the episode, but when the participants change, what makes the lesson continue to govern the team? We introduce Relic, which turns recurring collaboration failures into organization-owned, executable protocols. Members reflect on visible work, propose rules, and govern their adoption. Adopted protocols bind triggers, responsibilities, required evidence, and execution consequences to the runtime, while remaining open to revision and retirement. In one traced case, repeated integration friction produces an interface-review rule that governs later pull requests and is revised as work continues. Across 360 controlled runs over ten software workloads and three models, Relic raises complete-contract delivery from 14.06% to 19.76% (+5.71 percentage points) over a matched structured team without the protocol lifecycle, improving all four verified production endpoints in every model stratum. Under fresh-member transfer, behavioral correctness is 25.4% with no inherited protocol, 34.6% with the same rules provided as readable text, and 41.2% with executable bindings, a +6.5-point advantage over text alone. On the full CooperBench benchmark, after excluding broken benchmark pairs, Relic achieves 367/477 (76.9%), establishing the best reported result among peer-structured systems. On the fixed 48-pair same-model subset, Relic also exceeds Solo (29/48 vs. 26/48), reversing the coordination loss exhibited by the official peer baseline. Together, these results show how collaboration experience can become persistent organizational state that remains useful beyond the members who created it.

ulab-ai ulab
·
Sep 25 1

Novice Developers' Perspectives on Adopting LLMs for Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Following the rise of large language models (LLMs), many studies have emerged in recent years focusing on exploring the adoption of LLM-based tools for software development by novice developers: computer science/software engineering students and early-career industry developers with two years or less of professional experience. These studies have sought to understand the perspectives of novice developers on using these tools, a critical aspect of the successful adoption of LLMs in software engineering. To systematically collect and summarise these studies, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) following the guidelines by Kitchenham et al. on 80 primary studies published between April 2022 and June 2025 to answer four research questions (RQs). In answering RQ1, we categorised the study motivations and methodological approaches. In RQ2, we identified the software development tasks for which novice developers use LLMs. In RQ3, we categorised the advantages, challenges, and recommendations discussed in the studies. Finally, we discuss the study limitations and future research needs suggested in the primary studies in answering RQ4. Throughout the paper, we also indicate directions for future work and implications for software engineering researchers, educators, and developers. Our research artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/Samuellucas97/SupplementaryInfoPackage-SLR.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

WebCloud: Recruiting web browsers for content distribution

We are at the beginning of a shift in how content is created and exchanged over the web. While content was previously created primarily by a small set of entities, today, individual users -- empowered by devices like digital cameras and services like online social networks -- are creating content that represents a significant fraction of Internet traffic. As a result, content today is increasingly generated and exchanged at the edge of the network. Unfortunately, the existing techniques and infrastructure that are still used to serve this content, such as centralized content distribution networks, are ill-suited for these new patterns of content exchange. In this paper, we take a first step towards addressing this situation by introducing WebCloud, a content distribution system for online social networking sites that works by re- purposing web browsers to help serve content. In other words, when a user browses content, WebCloud tries to fetch it from one of that user's friend's browsers, instead of from the social networking site. The result is a more direct exchange of content ; essentially, WebCloud leverages the spatial and temporal locality of interest between social network users. Because WebCloud is built using techniques already present in many web browsers, it can be applied today to many social networking sites. We demonstrate the practicality of WebCloud with microbenchmarks, simulations, and a prototype deployment.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2011

VeriHarm-Bench: Measuring Harmful Success in LLM Coding Agents Verifiably

Large language model (LLM) coding agents increasingly operate with shell access, allowing them to write scripts, move files, alter permissions, and modify system configurations. However, an agent may achieve a user's goal while causing unintended harm, such as deleting unrelated files, weakening access controls, or corrupting data, in response to benign inputs without explicit jailbreaking. This failure mode is particularly important because apparent task success may reassure users that an agent behaved correctly, causing harmful side effects to go unnoticed. We call this harmful success: the agent successfully completes the intended benign task while simultaneously causing unintended harm. Despite its importance, harmful success is difficult to measure because conventional task-success metrics overlook harmful behaviors, while existing safety evaluations are often designed solely to assess harmful outcomes. We introduce VeriHarm, an automatic framework for constructing programmatically verifiable benchmarks that directly measure harmful success. VeriHarm minimally perturbs coding tasks to elicit unintended harmful behavior while maintaining the benignity of the task and preserving the original task objective. It then synthesizes executable harm tests that, together with the original task-correctness tests, evaluate both task accuracy and harmful outcomes. Frontier agents, including GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude-Opus-5, achieve an average task accuracy of 95% on our curated VeriHarm-Bench, yet still struggle to complete tasks safely: their safe success rate, the fraction of tasks completed successfully without triggering the designated harm, averages only 37%. These results suggest that successful task completion can frequently coexist with unintended harm, and that task-success metrics alone may substantially understate the potential safety risks of coding agents.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 1

Chat2Scenic: An Iterative RAG-Based Framework for Scenario Generation in Autonomous Driving

Validating autonomous driving systems requires diverse, regulation-compliant test scenarios. In simulation-based testing, scenarios are defined as executable scripts. Yet automatically generating such scripts from regulatory descriptions remains an open challenge, and existing approaches face fundamental trade-offs. Retrieval-assemble methods achieve reasonable compilation rates but lack scalability, whereas retrieval-based full-script generation suffers from low compilation success rates. We present Chat2Scenic, the first iterative retrieval-augmented framework to generate scenario scripts in Domain Specific Language (DSL). Specifically, Chat2Scenic provides a chatbot interface that supports interactive scenario refinement and integrates Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) to ground scenario generation in regulatory knowledge and DSL syntax. Furthermore, we propose an open benchmark for scenario generation comprising 123 scenarios from various regulations, including NHTSA and United Nations Vehicle Regulations, as well as other sources. Extensive evaluation with State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates that Chat2Scenic achieves 76.42% Compilation Success Rate (CSR) and 58.17% Framework Accuracy (FA), outperforming existing methods (Retrieval Assemble with 30.08% CSR, 11.03% FA and Retrieval full script generation with 16.26% CSR, 10.86% FA). To facilitate future research, we release our code as open source at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/chat2scenic.

CooperBench: Why Coding Agents Cannot be Your Teammates Yet

Resolving team conflicts requires not only task-specific competence, but also social intelligence to find common ground and build consensus. As AI agents increasingly collaborate on complex work, they must develop coordination capabilities to function as effective teammates. Yet we hypothesize that current agents lack these capabilities. To test this, we introduce CooperBench, a benchmark of over 600 collaborative coding tasks across 12 libraries in 4 programming languages. Each task assigns two agents different features that can be implemented independently but may conflict without proper coordination. Tasks are grounded in real open-source repositories with expert-written tests. Evaluating state-of-the-art coding agents, we observe the curse of coordination: agents achieve on average 30% lower success rates when working together compared to performing both tasks individually. This contrasts sharply with human teams, where adding teammates typically improves productivity. Our analysis reveals three key issues: (1) communication channels become jammed with vague, ill-timed, and inaccurate messages; (2) even with effective communication, agents deviate from their commitments; and (3) agents often hold incorrect expectations about others' plans and communication. Through large-scale simulation, we also observe rare but interesting emergent coordination behavior including role division, resource division, and negotiation. Our research presents a novel benchmark for collaborative coding and calls for a shift from pursuing individual agent capability to developing social intelligence.

stanfordnlp Stanford NLP
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Jan 19 3

OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Web

For decades, human-computer interaction has fundamentally been manual. Even today, almost all productive work done on the computer necessitates human input at every step. Autonomous virtual agents represent an exciting step in automating many of these menial tasks. Virtual agents would empower users with limited technical proficiency to harness the full possibilities of computer systems. They could also enable the efficient streamlining of numerous computer tasks, ranging from calendar management to complex travel bookings, with minimal human intervention. In this paper, we introduce OmniACT, the first-of-a-kind dataset and benchmark for assessing an agent's capability to generate executable programs to accomplish computer tasks. Our scope extends beyond traditional web automation, covering a diverse range of desktop applications. The dataset consists of fundamental tasks such as "Play the next song", as well as longer horizon tasks such as "Send an email to John Doe mentioning the time and place to meet". Specifically, given a pair of screen image and a visually-grounded natural language task, the goal is to generate a script capable of fully executing the task. We run several strong baseline language model agents on our benchmark. The strongest baseline, GPT-4, performs the best on our benchmark However, its performance level still reaches only 15% of the human proficiency in generating executable scripts capable of completing the task, demonstrating the challenge of our task for conventional web agents. Our benchmark provides a platform to measure and evaluate the progress of language model agents in automating computer tasks and motivates future work towards building multimodal models that bridge large language models and the visual grounding of computer screens.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024 6

AEGIS: An Agent-based Framework for General Bug Reproduction from Issue Descriptions

In software maintenance, bug reproduction is essential for effective fault localization and repair. Manually writing reproduction scripts is a time-consuming task with high requirements for developers. Hence, automation of bug reproduction has increasingly attracted attention from researchers and practitioners. However, the existing studies on bug reproduction are generally limited to specific bug types such as program crashes, and hard to be applied to general bug reproduction. In this paper, considering the superior performance of agent-based methods in code intelligence tasks, we focus on designing an agent-based framework for the task. Directly employing agents would lead to limited bug reproduction performance, due to entangled subtasks, lengthy retrieved context, and unregulated actions. To mitigate the challenges, we propose an Automated gEneral buG reproductIon Scripts generation framework, named AEGIS, which is the first agent-based framework for the task. AEGIS mainly contains two modules: (1) A concise context construction module, which aims to guide the code agent in extracting structured information from issue descriptions, identifying issue-related code with detailed explanations, and integrating these elements to construct the concise context; (2) A FSM-based multi-feedback optimization module to further regulate the behavior of the code agent within the finite state machine (FSM), ensuring a controlled and efficient script generation process based on multi-dimensional feedback. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark dataset show that AEGIS outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by 23.0% in F->P metric. In addition, the bug reproduction scripts generated by AEGIS can improve the relative resolved rate of Agentless by 12.5%.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

FilmAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for End-to-End Film Automation in Virtual 3D Spaces

Virtual film production requires intricate decision-making processes, including scriptwriting, virtual cinematography, and precise actor positioning and actions. Motivated by recent advances in automated decision-making with language agent-based societies, this paper introduces FilmAgent, a novel LLM-based multi-agent collaborative framework for end-to-end film automation in our constructed 3D virtual spaces. FilmAgent simulates various crew roles, including directors, screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers, and covers key stages of a film production workflow: (1) idea development transforms brainstormed ideas into structured story outlines; (2) scriptwriting elaborates on dialogue and character actions for each scene; (3) cinematography determines the camera setups for each shot. A team of agents collaborates through iterative feedback and revisions, thereby verifying intermediate scripts and reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the generated videos on 15 ideas and 4 key aspects. Human evaluation shows that FilmAgent outperforms all baselines across all aspects and scores 3.98 out of 5 on average, showing the feasibility of multi-agent collaboration in filmmaking. Further analysis reveals that FilmAgent, despite using the less advanced GPT-4o model, surpasses the single-agent o1, showing the advantage of a well-coordinated multi-agent system. Lastly, we discuss the complementary strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora and our FilmAgent in filmmaking.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025 3

SkillGLoW: Procedural-Family Skill Consolidation for Self-Improving Agents on Long-Horizon Task Streams

LLM agents increasingly self-improve by writing and reusing textual skills, kept either as one global document or as a flat pool of per-task entries, though most of the evidence comes from domains with structurally similar tasks. On long-horizon workloads where each task demands a different solution, the two forms fail in opposite ways: the document collapses into generic discipline, while the pool inflates and its entries stay bound to the instance that wrote them. We argue the missing unit of reuse is the solving procedure shared by a cluster of related tasks, and build SkillGLoW (Global-Local Weave) around it: the local skills a task writes from its own execution are aggregated into procedural families and compressed into de-instantiated global priors, while the instance detail they hold is regenerated per task rather than stored; a commit gate admits a prior only when real execution shows it does not degrade the deployed library. Across four benchmarks (mathematical reasoning, terminal automation, software repair, and embodied control) and three models, the priors gain 17.2 points (hard) over the no-skill baseline on average, with positive gains in all 12 continual-improvement runs, and 18.0 with local regeneration, while the library holds one prior per procedural family, 3.6x more compact than the per-task pool. Under the same protocol GLoW leads a published single-document optimizer on 15 of 21 cells. Unmodified, the library lifts success on unseen ALFWorld tasks from 73.9% to 83.9%, evidence that what transfers is procedure rather than task memory.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 1

From Zero to OCR: A Data-Centric Framework for Unsupported Low-Resource Scripts

Optical character recognition (OCR) remains inaccessible to many low-resource scripts because annotated document images are unavailable and synthetic training data can fail to preserve script-specific visual structure. We present a data-centric framework that builds end-to-end OCR for such scripts from only an unannotated text corpus and digital fonts, without manually annotating a single training image. A synthetic data engine renders word, line and page images with correct complex-script shaping and automatically derived labels; a YOLOv8 word detector and a convolutional recurrent recognizer trained with connectionist temporal classification learn from these images; and a stage-gate evaluation protocol isolates recognition error before detection is introduced. We demonstrate the framework on Kashmiri, a Perso-Arabic Nastaliq script with approximately 6.8 million speakers that none of six widely used OCR engines supports. Three line-level recognizers, including one transferred from Arabic, stalled between 41% and 79% character error rate (CER), motivating a word-level formulation; subsequent improvements came primarily from rendering fidelity, diacritic-preserving crop margins and tuned non-maximum suppression. The resulting system achieves 0.39% CER on held-out words, 10.0% on synthetic pages and 13.5% on browser-rendered digital pages, and establishes reference results of 18.45% on typeset book pages and 49.8% on degraded historical documents. We publicly release the trained models, the inference code and a synthetic dataset of 285,864 Kashmiri text-line images, and we describe a step-by-step procedure for building OCR for other unsupported scripts.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 17

"Your AI, My Shell": Demystifying Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic AI Coding Editors

Agentic AI coding editors driven by large language models have recently become more popular due to their ability to improve developer productivity during software development. Modern editors such as Cursor are designed not just for code completion, but also with more system privileges for complex coding tasks (e.g., run commands in the terminal, access development environments, and interact with external systems). While this brings us closer to the "fully automated programming" dream, it also raises new security concerns. In this study, we present the first empirical analysis of prompt injection attacks targeting these high-privilege agentic AI coding editors. We show how attackers can remotely exploit these systems by poisoning external development resources with malicious instructions, effectively hijacking AI agents to run malicious commands, turning "your AI" into "attacker's shell". To perform this analysis, we implement AIShellJack, an automated testing framework for assessing prompt injection vulnerabilities in agentic AI coding editors. AIShellJack contains 314 unique attack payloads that cover 70 techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Using AIShellJack, we conduct a large-scale evaluation on GitHub Copilot and Cursor, and our evaluation results show that attack success rates can reach as high as 84% for executing malicious commands. Moreover, these attacks are proven effective across a wide range of objectives, ranging from initial access and system discovery to credential theft and data exfiltration.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Where Are Large Language Models for Code Generation on GitHub?

The increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has garnered significant attention from researchers assessing the quality of the code they generate. However, much of the research focuses on controlled datasets such as HumanEval, which fail to adequately represent how developers actually utilize LLMs' code generation capabilities or clarify the characteristics of LLM-generated code in real-world development scenarios. To bridge this gap, our study investigates the characteristics of LLM-generated code and its corresponding projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings reveal several key insights: (1) ChatGPT and Copilot are the most frequently utilized for generating code on GitHub. In contrast, there is very little code generated by other LLMs on GitHub. (2) Projects containing ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code are often small and less known, led by individuals or small teams. Despite this, most projects are continuously evolving and improving. (3) ChatGPT/Copilot is mainly utilized for generating Python, Java, and TypeScript scripts for data processing and transformation. C/C++ and JavaScript code generation focuses on algorithm and data structure implementation and user interface code. Most ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code snippets are relatively short and exhibit low complexity. (4) Compared to human-written code, ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code exists in a small proportion of projects and generally undergoes fewer modifications. Additionally, modifications due to bugs are even fewer, ranging from just 3% to 8% across different languages. (5) Most comments on ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code lack detailed information, often only stating the code's origin without mentioning prompts, human modifications, or testing status. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications for researchers and practitioners.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

UniSkill: Learning Actor-Aligned Skill Proposals for an Evolving Policy

Large language model agents can improve across tasks by retaining reusable skills distilled from prior interactions. Recent work jointly optimizes task execution and skill extraction, enabling the policy and skillbank to co-evolve. However, as the actor continues learning, rewarding skill proposals through their reuse in subsequent training steps may conflate skill benefits with actor improvement, while directly testing each proposed skill requires costly additional actor rollouts. In this paper, we introduce UniSkill, which uses a shared policy to interact with the environment and propose skillbank edits (Add, Update, or No Edit) from the resulting trajectories. Specifically, the actor learns from environment rewards, while contrastive action feedback guides skill proposal learning. This feedback provides an actor-alignment signal by measuring how replacing the retrieved skill with a proposed skill changes the current actor's action log-likelihood gap between previously collected successful and failed trajectories from the same task, thereby avoiding new rollouts for each proposal. Since proposal-level feedback may suppress an otherwise appropriate edit operation when the proposed skill content scores poorly, we further apply skill-edit support regularization to preserve exploration. Empirically, UniSkill achieves strong performance, reaching 98.4% success on ALFWorld and 84.7% on WebShop while maintaining stable joint training. Further ALFWorld experiments show that UniSkill remains effective when the shared policy uses a smaller backbone. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/LimOkii/UniSKill.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6 1

DramaAgent: Agentic Storytelling Video Generation

Recent diffusion and autoregressive models have substantially improved text-to-video generation, yet producing coherent long-form story videos with consistent characters and aligned audio remains challenging. Existing methods often suffer from narrative drift, unstable character identity, weak cross-scene continuity, and audio-visual mismatch over extended sequences. We propose DramaAgent, a hierarchical, agentic, and model-agnostic framework for long-form text-to-video-and-audio generation. Rather than improving the underlying video backbone itself, DramaAgent introduces an upper-level control layer that decomposes generation into story planning, persistent character conditioning, scene-wise synthesis, and reflection-guided targeted repair. The framework maintains reusable story and character states across scenes, diagnoses failures such as identity drift, missing scene semantics, temporal discontinuity, and cross-modal mismatch, and repairs problematic clips in a stage-specific manner. Experiments across multiple video generation backbones show that DramaAgent improves long-horizon coherence, character consistency, narrative fidelity, and scene-level audio-visual consistency over direct generation and strong baselines. These results suggest that hierarchical agentic control is a practical direction for controllable long-form audiovisual generation. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DramaAgent. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/DramaAgent.

  • 8 authors
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Sep 7

WeaveBench: A Long-Horizon, Real-World Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents with Hybrid Interfaces

Computer-use agents (CUAs) increasingly operate in runtimes that combine visual desktop control, command-line execution, code editing, browsers, and external tools. Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate these interfaces as separable capabilities, leaving long-horizon cross-interface orchestration under-tested. Thus, we introduce WeaveBench, a long-horizon hybrid-interface benchmark with 114 tasks across 8 real-world work domains, grounded in real user requests and publicly verifiable artifacts. Each task requires agents to combine GUI observations/actions with CLI/code operations within a single trajectory. We evaluate these tasks on a real Ubuntu desktop inside deployed CLI-agent runtimes, augmented with a minimal desktop-control plugin. We also propose a companion trajectory-aware judge that inspects deliverables, files, screenshots, logs, and action traces, while detecting shortcut behaviors such as fabricated visual evidence or hard-coded metrics. Across frontier model-runtime pairings, the best PassRate reaches only 41.2%, showing the benchmark remains far from saturated. The trajectory-aware judge further reveals that outcome-only grading substantially overestimates agent performance. Overall, WeaveBench exposes a critical gap in CUA evaluation and provides an effective testbed to measure whether agents can orchestrate GUI, CLI, and code operations across long-horizon real-world tasks.

microsoft Microsoft
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Jun 7 2

LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to different languages. These embeddings are discarded for two main reasons: (1) mPLMs are expected to have a single, unified parameter set across all languages, and (2) they need to function seamlessly as universal text encoders without requiring language IDs as input. However, this removal increases the burden on token embeddings to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder the model's ability to produce more language-neutral representations. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning while maintaining a simple architecture. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline. Extensive analysis further shows that language/script embeddings encode language/script-specific information, which improves the selection of source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms

Multi-agent AI science ecosystems rely on agents possessing tools that allow them to communicate, coordinate, and build on each other's work. Yet this shared infrastructure can also introduce vulnerabilities by creating a substrate for the contagious spread of unintended and undesirable behaviors. We report a case study on a research collective of 100 autonomous LLM agents tasked with proving formal mathematical conjectures. Within the swarm, cheating spontaneously emerged and was later challenged by whistleblowers - both without any external intervention. When a single agent discovered an exploit in the evaluation system, it propagated across the collective via a shared knowledge library and later through peer-to-peer messages. Despite early reluctance, a cohort of agents adopted the exploit in response to competitive pressure. A separate group of agents produced an emergent counter-response: auditing fraudulent proofs, alerting peers across broadcast and private channels, staging boycotts, lodging formal complaints, and proposing validation patches. In recent incidents, agent swarms coordinated covertly through improvised side-channels (Dalton and Wallace, 2026; Greenblatt et al., 2026). Our setting differs: the same transparent channels that carried the exploit also gave non-cheating agents the visibility they needed to detect fraud, organize resistance, and enforce norms. We cast the problem of managing the agents' shared infrastructure as the knowledge commons governance problem (Ostrom, 1990). To protect the commons from exploits, we propose to adopt institutional mechanisms, such as graduated sanctioning and collective-choice rules, to support decentralized self-governance in autonomous swarms.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 2

Computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks from biomedical publications

Jupyter notebooks facilitate the bundling of executable code with its documentation and output in one interactive environment, and they represent a popular mechanism to document and share computational workflows. The reproducibility of computational aspects of research is a key component of scientific reproducibility but has not yet been assessed at scale for Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. We address computational reproducibility at two levels: First, using fully automated workflows, we analyzed the computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks related to publications indexed in PubMed Central. We identified such notebooks by mining the articles full text, locating them on GitHub and re-running them in an environment as close to the original as possible. We documented reproduction success and exceptions and explored relationships between notebook reproducibility and variables related to the notebooks or publications. Second, this study represents a reproducibility attempt in and of itself, using essentially the same methodology twice on PubMed Central over two years. Out of 27271 notebooks from 2660 GitHub repositories associated with 3467 articles, 22578 notebooks were written in Python, including 15817 that had their dependencies declared in standard requirement files and that we attempted to re-run automatically. For 10388 of these, all declared dependencies could be installed successfully, and we re-ran them to assess reproducibility. Of these, 1203 notebooks ran through without any errors, including 879 that produced results identical to those reported in the original notebook and 324 for which our results differed from the originally reported ones. Running the other notebooks resulted in exceptions. We zoom in on common problems, highlight trends and discuss potential improvements to Jupyter-related workflows associated with biomedical publications.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Trajectory-Level Speculation with Semantic Verification for Tool-Using Agents

Large language model agents solve tasks through long sequences of tool calls, and the prevailing design has a single strong model generate every step, although many steps are routine enough for a much smaller model. Existing ways of sharing this work keep the strong model as the generator: routers and collaborative agents decide which model handles each query or step, and speculative methods check a small model's drafts one step at a time, usually against the strong model's own action. We introduce SpecAgent, a collaboration protocol that turns the strong model from the author of each step into a reviewer of steps drafted by a weak model. The weak model executes read-only tool calls as it drafts, so that every step is grounded in real observations, and holds the first action that would modify the environment. The strong model then verifies the drafted segment in a single prefill pass, commits the longest prefix it judges semantically valid, and repairs the first rejected step. Because verification replaces autoregressive decoding with parallel prefill, the strong model decodes only short verdicts and occasional repairs rather than every step. On τ^2-Bench, SpecAgent comes within one point of the strong model's success rate while roughly halving memory traffic and wall time, and on AutomationBench and VitaBench it recovers 44-75% of the quality gap while lowering both. In an edge-cloud deployment on MCP-Atlas with three cloud models, it closes 53-75% of the weak-strong quality gap while the strong model generates at most half as many tokens. These results suggest that a strong model need not author every step of an agent: reviewing grounded drafts retains most of its quality while cutting both latency and memory traffic.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14 2

Reversa: A Reverse Documentation Engineering Framework for Converting Legacy Software into Operational Specifications for AI Agents

Legacy systems concentrate business rules, architectural decisions, and operational exceptions that often remain implicit in code, data, configuration, and maintenance practices. At the same time, language-model-based coding agents depend on reliable context, correctness criteria, and behavioral contracts to modify real systems with lower risk. This paper presents Reversa, a reverse documentation engineering framework for converting legacy software into traceable operational specifications for AI agents. Reversa organizes this process as a multi-agent pipeline: specialized agents map the project surface, analyze modules, extract implicit rules, synthesize architecture, write unit-level specifications, and review generated claims. The proposal emphasizes three mechanisms: traceability between code and specification, explicit confidence marking, and preservation of gaps for human validation. The framework is distributed as a Node.js CLI, installs skills across multiple agent engines, and uses a SHA-256 manifest to preserve modified files during update or uninstall operations. In addition to the architectural description, we report an exploratory case study on migrating an ATM from COBOL to Go, in which the pipeline produced 517 claims classified by an internal confidence index, 10 registered gaps, 53 Gherkin parity scenarios, and a reconstruction plan with 9 of 11 tasks completed at inventory time. Final parity validation and cutover were not completed in this study. We do not claim broad empirical superiority; we position the contribution with respect to the literature on reverse engineering, LLM-based documentation, and software agents, and propose an evaluation protocol with metrics for coverage, traceability, confidence, utility, and cost.

  • 2 authors
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May 18

ResearchStudio-Reel: Automate the Last Mile of Research from Paper to Poster, Video, and Blog

Research dissemination, turning a paper into a poster, a talk video, and a blog post, is still a manual last mile. Prior automation treats each artifact in isolation that each re-extract the paper from scratch, usually ship one-way renders the author cannot reopen in PowerPoint or Word, and gates quality on soft VLM-preference scores that plateau while load-bearing sections still read as empty. We argue this last mile is best built as a composition of skills: thin agent-readable contracts that share one upstream extractor and wrap deterministic primitives in a measured-fill loop whose exits are hard pass/fail render gates. We instantiate this as ResearchStudio-Reel, five Claude Code and Codex skills organized into one shared extractor (Paper2Assets), three editable generators (Paper2Poster, Paper2Video, Paper2Blog), and one interactive convergence layer (Paper2Reel). Paper2Assets extracts each paper once into a shared bundle that can be reused by every downstream skill; The three generators produce a print-ready poster, a synchronized talk video, and a bilingual blog that stay factually consistent and round-trip through PowerPoint or Word; Paper2Reel then binds all three into a self-contained HTML viewer whose section-level clicks jump the video, slides, captions, and blog to matching content. On the Paper2Poster benchmark, our posters lead every aesthetic and information sub-criterion against both prior automated systems and single-shot frontier LLMs, surpassing the authors' own on aesthetics under two held-out VLM judges and winning overall on 84% to 93% of papers; capability audits further show that, by uniquely pairing narration-aligned on-slide highlights with a bilingual blog gated by layout-aware DOCX repair, ResearchStudio-Reel is the only pipeline to ship all three editable artifacts. Project is available at https://aka.ms/ResearchStudio

microsoft Microsoft
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Jul 4 7

Multi-Agent Penetration Testing AI for the Web

AI-powered development platforms are making software creation accessible to a broader audience, but this democratization has triggered a scalability crisis in security auditing. With studies showing that up to 40% of AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities, the pace of development now vastly outstrips the capacity for thorough security assessment. We present MAPTA, a multi-agent system for autonomous web application security assessment that combines large language model orchestration with tool-grounded execution and end-to-end exploit validation. On the 104-challenge XBOW benchmark, MAPTA achieves 76.9% overall success with perfect performance on SSRF and misconfiguration vulnerabilities, 83% success on broken authorization, and strong results on injection attacks including server-side template injection (85%) and SQL injection (83%). Cross-site scripting (57%) and blind SQL injection (0%) remain challenging. Our comprehensive cost analysis across all challenges totals 21.38 with a median cost of 0.073 for successful attempts versus 0.357 for failures. Success correlates strongly with resource efficiency, enabling practical early-stopping thresholds at approximately 40 tool calls or 0.30 per challenge. MAPTA's real-world findings are impactful given both the popularity of the respective scanned GitHub repositories (8K-70K stars) and MAPTA's low average operating cost of $3.67 per open-source assessment: MAPTA discovered critical vulnerabilities including RCEs, command injections, secret exposure, and arbitrary file write vulnerabilities. Findings are responsibly disclosed, 10 findings are under CVE review.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025