Nexus: Execution-Grounded Multi-Agent Test Oracle Synthesis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26423v1
• Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:20:25 GMT
• Title: Nexus: Execution-Grounded Multi-Agent Test Oracle Synthesis
• Authors: Dong Huang, Mingzhe Du, Jie M. Zhang, Zheng Lin, Meng Luo, Qianru Zhang, See-Kiong Ng,
• Abstract summary: Test oracle generation in non-regression testing is a longstanding challenge in software engineering.<n>We introduce Nexus, a novel multi-agent framework to address this challenge.
• Score: 57.40527331817245
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Test oracle generation in non-regression testing is a longstanding challenge in software engineering, where the goal is to produce oracles that can accurately determine whether a function under test (FUT) behaves as intended for a given input. In this paper, we introduce Nexus, a novel multi-agent framework to address this challenge. Nexus generates test oracles by leveraging a diverse set of specialized agents that synthesize test oracles through a structured process of deliberation, validation, and iterative self-refinement. During the deliberation phase, a panel of four specialist agents, each embodying a distinct testing philosophy, collaboratively critiques and refines an initial set of test oracles. Then, in the validation phase, Nexus generates a plausible candidate implementation of the FUT and executes the proposed oracles against it in a secure sandbox. For any oracle that fails this execution-based check, Nexus activates an automated selfrefinement loop, using the specific runtime error to debug and correct the oracle before re-validation. Our extensive evaluation on seven diverse benchmarks demonstrates that Nexus consistently and substantially outperforms state-of-theart baselines. For instance, Nexus improves the test-level oracle accuracy on the LiveCodeBench from 46.30% to 57.73% for GPT-4.1-Mini. The improved accuracy also significantly enhances downstream tasks: the bug detection rate of GPT4.1-Mini generated test oracles on HumanEval increases from 90.91% to 95.45% for Nexus compared to baselines, and the success rate of automated program repair improves from 35.23% to 69.32%.

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