Cost-Effective Repository Exploration for Agentic Issue Localization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29675v1
• Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2026 09:16:33 GMT
• Title: Cost-Effective Repository Exploration for Agentic Issue Localization
• Abstract summary: We study whether this stage can be delegated to lower-cost models.<n>We measure early candidate discovery, top-three gold-file coverage, strict file-set recovery, agent time, and token usage.<n>Highest-quality explorer leads across localization metrics, but substantially cheaper operating points emerge.
• Score: 0.2715382584771446
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Repository exploration is a distinct and costly stage of coding-agent pipelines: before generating a patch, an agent must identify which repository files are likely to matter. We study whether this stage can be delegated to lower-cost models while retaining useful localization quality. Using our IssueLoc-Bench, we evaluate five explorer models under the same read-only interactive interface on 499 SWE-bench Verified-derived tasks and 500 tasks from 153 additional repositories. We measure early candidate discovery, top-three gold-file coverage, strict file-set recovery, agent time, and token usage, with paired instance-level uncertainty and repository-clustered sensitivity analysis. The highest-quality explorer leads across localization metrics, but substantially cheaper operating points emerge: depending on the model and evaluation arm, lower-cost explorers retain approximately 78-94% of the reference Hit@3 and 73-92% of its F1 while reducing mean agent time by 41-88% and token usage by 84-95%. The preferred operating point depends on how localization is consumed downstream: ranking and coverage metrics characterize recoverable candidate handoffs, whereas F1 and exact match characterize restrictive file gates. These results support treating repository exploration as an independently measurable and budgetable stage of modular coding agents, with explorer selection guided by the downstream handoff contract.

Related papers

• GoAnt: Quality-Diversity Multi-Agent Search for Alpha Factor Discovery in Market Microstructure Data [0.0]
  GoAnt is a quality-diversity multi-agent search framework that combines non-communicating Explorer, Exploiter and Connector workers with a shared adaptive Mental Map and a compact Queen dispatcher.<n>GoAnt reaches quality-weighted yields of 41.8 and 47.6 in price-volume and order-book settings, improving the strongest baseline by 57% and 97% under matched budgets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-09-08T13:19:18Z)
• The Thousand-Graph Hypothesis: A Testable Hypothesis of Task-Conditioned Relation Materialization in Repository-Level Code Reasoning [2.7787094635105185]
  Training repository knowledge into models is costly and quickly stale, while local retrieval can miss scattered requirements.<n>We propose an entity-only external interface with task-conditioned relation materialization during inference.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-27T04:33:48Z)
• From Sequence to Structure: Relational Uncertainty Propagation for LLM Agents [75.69180947909148]
  We propose a trajectory-level UQ framework for large language model (LLM) agents.<n>RuPA represents an execution history as a directed trajectory graph in which reasoning states, tool interactions, and environment feedback are nodes connected by temporal and semantic dependency edges.<n>We evaluate RUPA on representative agent benchmarks, including $$-2, Terminal-Bench-2, and GAIA, using 6 open-source LLMs spanning multiple model families.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-17T01:40:14Z)
• A-SR: Self-Evolving Agentic LLMs for Symbolic Regression via Hierarchical Coordination [51.06539604709775]
  We propose A-SR, a self-evolving agentic framework that shifts the control unit from expression edits to role-conditioned evidence views.<n>A-SR coordinates formula discovery through routing among coordination protocols, an online evaluator-reward role policy, and state-routed process memory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-05T14:01:10Z)
• DREA: Decoupled Reasoning and Exploration Agents for Repository-Level Vulnerability Detection [16.007199928732614]
  We present DREA, a hypothesis-driven framework for repository-level vulnerability detection.<n>Goal-directed context acquisition is the primary source of detection improvement in this design.<n>To support evaluation, we construct RepoPairBench, a repository-grounded benchmark of validated Python vulnerability-fix pairs from real-world projects.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-15T04:49:05Z)
• SingGuard-NSFA: Extensible Guardrails for Agentic AI via Generative Reasoning and Real-Time Classification [0.0]
  nsfaguard is a guardrail framework for securing agentic AI systems against operational threats.<n>We first introduce the NSFA taxonomy, which organizes 185 risk variants into a CIA-triad-grounded hierarchy.<n>We develop a dual-mode approach combining SFT-based generative reasoning for interpretable offline auditing with discriminative classification heads on the frozen backbone.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-13T07:28:45Z)
• PACE: A Proxy for Agentic Capability Evaluation [60.3743414796937]
  We introduce PACE, a framework that constructs proxy benchmarks by selecting instances from existing non-agentic evaluations.<n>Experiments across 14 models, 4 agentic benchmarks, and 19 non-agentic benchmarks show that PACE-Bench predicts agentic scores with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) mean absolute error (MAE) under 4%, Spearman correlation above 0.80, and pairwise model-ranking accuracy around 85%, all at much less than 1% of the full agentic evaluation cost.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-02T10:59:03Z)
• Persistent AI Agents in Academic Research: A Single-Investigator Implementation Case Study [0.0]
  The unit of analysis was the persistent human-agent environment: researcher, agent, memory layer, tools, repositories, scheduled jobs, specialized agent roles, and governance rules.<n>A strict May 2026 trajectory subset captured 627 model-related events and 73.95 million recorded tokens, of which 82.9% were cache reads.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-26T11:28:36Z)
• RepoMirage: Probing Repository Context Reasoning in Code Agents with Perturbations [51.43574078961796]
  We introduce RepoMirage, a two-stage evaluation suite built on SWE-Bench Verified.<n>RepoMirage-Perturb applies three types of semantics-preserving repository-level perturbations, revealing a clear performance drop when correct solving requires broader context access.<n>We propose RepoAnchor, a structure-first prototype workflow that separates repository exploration from downstream problem solving.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-25T06:26:43Z)
• ComplexMCP: Evaluation of LLM Agents in Dynamic, Interdependent, and Large-Scale Tool Sandbox [61.862814740220806]
  $textbfComplexMCP$ is a benchmark designed to evaluate agents in rigorous conditions.<n>Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), $textbfComplexMCP$ provides over 300 meticulously tested tools.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-11T16:20:51Z)
• AgenticRAG: Agentic Retrieval for Enterprise Knowledge Bases [0.7176906280023592]
  We present AgenticRAG, a practical agentic harness for retrieval and analysis over enterprise knowledge bases.<n>Our approach reduces this overdependence by layering a lightweight harness on top of existing enterprise search infrastructure.<n>Our results demonstrate its suitability for real-world enterprise production environments.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-07T00:39:22Z)
• Eigen-1: Adaptive Multi-Agent Refinement with Monitor-Based RAG for Scientific Reasoning [53.45095336430027]
  We develop a unified framework that combines implicit retrieval and structured collaboration.<n>On Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) Bio/Chem Gold, our framework achieves 48.3% accuracy.<n>Results on SuperGPQA and TRQA confirm robustness across domains.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-25T14:05:55Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.