Beyond Pass@k: Measuring Reliability and Security of Agentic Code Generation
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14711v1
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:01:15 GMT
- Title: Beyond Pass@k: Measuring Reliability and Security of Agentic Code Generation
- Abstract summary: We propose reliability@k, the same estimator applied correctly, with n = independent rollouts and c = fully-passing rollouts per (task, agent) pair.<n>Motivated by evidence that functional correctness does not imply security safety, we additionally propose security-adjusted reliability@k.
- Score: 2.1734195143282693
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: AI coding agent benchmarks rank agents with the Chen et al. (2021) pass@k estimator, but current implementations misapply it: they set n to the number of unit tests in a single submission rather than the number of independent rollout attempts, conflating test-suite size with attempt independence. We diagnose this operationalization error, prove it by counterexample, and propose reliability@k, the same estimator applied correctly, with n = independent rollouts and c = fully-passing rollouts per (task, agent) pair. In a synthetic multi-rollout benchmark, the misapplied metric inflates reported scores by 0.85-0.97 in absolute terms (0.96-0.98 reported vs. 0.00-0.12 corrected), and a cheap single-rollout proxy fails to substitute for repeated runs (Spearman $ρ= 0.417$). Motivated by evidence that functional correctness does not imply security safety, we additionally propose security-adjusted reliability@k, which counts only rollouts that are both functionally correct and free of high-severity insecure patterns. In an initial live-API test with three agents, the adjustment did not change any ranking under our current scanner and threshold, so we present it as a proposed complementary lens whose decisive evaluation requires better-powered future runs. Finally, a preliminary 5-task SWE-bench Verified pilot observes the same core concern in a real repository setting: macro-averaged hidden-test pass rate was 0.80 while strict task resolution was 0.20.
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