From Patches to Trajectories: Privileged Process Supervision for Software-Engineering Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21996v1
• Date: Thu, 21 May 2026 04:54:55 GMT
• Title: From Patches to Trajectories: Privileged Process Supervision for Software-Engineering Agents
• Abstract summary: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long teacher trajectories is the dominant way to instill investigation and reasoning in open software-engineering (SWE) agents.<n>We propose Patches-to-Trajectories (P2T), which uses $pstar$ as privileged information during curation and formulates trajectory construction as bi-objective optimization over per-step effectiveness and trajectory length.
• Score: 56.31499185764872
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long teacher trajectories is the dominant way to instill investigation and reasoning in open software-engineering (SWE) agents. Since every retained response becomes an imitation target, the student inherits the final outcome and intermediate flaws, including ungrounded leaps and redundant loops. High-quality training data must be effective(each step is grounded and narrows the agent's epistemic gap to the correct fix) and efficient(each step is information-bearing rather than redundant or looping). Existing recipes filter or relabel teacher rollouts using only a binary terminal verifier, which does not directly target these axes and provides no supervision on instances where the teacher fails. Most real issue includes a developer-authored reference patch, $p^\star$, revealing the file paths, runtime behaviors, and coding conventions presupposed by the correct fix, yet standard pipelines discard it. We propose Patches-to-Trajectories (P2T), which uses $p^\star$ as privileged information during curation and formulates trajectory construction as bi-objective optimization over per-step effectiveness and trajectory length. A reverse phase distills $p^\star$ into a latent process graph, $G^\star$, of contextual facts and solution milestones. A forward phase curates trajectories from blinded teacher continuations by scoring per-step progress against $G^\star$ under a leakage-blocking groundedness check and retaining the shortest effective segments. Using only 1.8k curated SWE-Gym instances, P2T improves effectiveness and efficiency over outcome-filtered SFT and its tool-error-masking variant. On SWE-bench Verified, it raises Pass@1 by up to 10.8 points while reducing per-instance inference cost by ~15%, with consistent gains on SWE-bench Lite. Size-matched ablations and qualitative analysis further isolate trajectory quality from data scale.

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