Thinking Longer, Not Larger: Enhancing Software Engineering Agents via Scaling Test-Time Compute

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23803v2
• Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2025 12:36:08 GMT
• Title: Thinking Longer, Not Larger: Enhancing Software Engineering Agents via Scaling Test-Time Compute
• Authors: Yingwei Ma, Yongbin Li, Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Rongyu Cao, Jue Chen, Fei Huang, Binhua Li,
• Abstract summary: We propose a unified Test-Time Compute scaling framework that leverages increased inference-time instead of larger models.<n>Our framework incorporates two complementary strategies: internal TTC and external TTC.<n>We demonstrate our textbf32B model achieves a 46% issue resolution rate, surpassing significantly larger models such as DeepSeek R1 671B and OpenAI o1.
• Score: 61.00662702026523
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent advancements in software engineering agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating program improvements. However, their reliance on closed-source or resource-intensive models introduces significant deployment challenges in private environments, prompting a critical question: \textit{How can personally deployable open-source LLMs achieve comparable code reasoning performance?} To this end, we propose a unified Test-Time Compute scaling framework that leverages increased inference-time computation instead of larger models. Our framework incorporates two complementary strategies: internal TTC and external TTC. Internally, we introduce a \textit{development-contextualized trajectory synthesis} method leveraging real-world software repositories to bootstrap multi-stage reasoning processes, such as fault localization and patch generation. We further enhance trajectory quality through rejection sampling, rigorously evaluating trajectories along accuracy and complexity. Externally, we propose a novel \textit{development-process-based search} strategy guided by reward models and execution verification. This approach enables targeted computational allocation at critical development decision points, overcoming limitations of existing "end-point only" verification methods. Evaluations on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate our \textbf{32B model achieves a 46\% issue resolution rate}, surpassing significantly larger models such as DeepSeek R1 671B and OpenAI o1. Additionally, we provide the empirical validation of the test-time scaling phenomenon within SWE agents, revealing that \textbf{models dynamically allocate more tokens to increasingly challenging problems}, effectively enhancing reasoning capabilities. We publicly release all training data, models, and code to facilitate future research. https://github.com/yingweima2022/SWE-Reasoner

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