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Autori principali: Hamblin, Grant, Song, Kevin, Zhu, Zhanda, Jayarajan, Anand, Liu, Sihang, Vijaykumar, Nandita, Pekhimenko, Gennady
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30314
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author Hamblin, Grant
Song, Kevin
Zhu, Zhanda
Jayarajan, Anand
Liu, Sihang
Vijaykumar, Nandita
Pekhimenko, Gennady
author_facet Hamblin, Grant
Song, Kevin
Zhu, Zhanda
Jayarajan, Anand
Liu, Sihang
Vijaykumar, Nandita
Pekhimenko, Gennady
contents Software engineering (SWE) agents are transitioning from code generation to full software development lifecycle automation. A critical phase in this lifecycle is specification design: transforming initial proposals into carefully considered requirements through expert review. Existing benchmarks such as SWE-Bench are implementation-focused by measuring the agent's ability to generate code given fixed, precise design requirements. This formulation assumes specifications are correct and complete. In real-world complex and critical software systems, initial specifications are often incomplete and flawed, requiring extensive expert reviews and revisions before being accepted for implementation. To fill this gap, we introduce SpecBench to evaluate specification-level reasoning: the ability to generate complete, unambiguous, consistent, and correct system specifications. SpecBench tasks are derived from the Request for Comments (RFC) process used by mature open-source projects. For each task, an agent is given an initial design proposal, the project codebase, and all past project RFC discussions. The agent is tasked with identifying specification deficiencies: omissions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, or incorrect assumptions in the initial proposal. We evaluate predictions against critiques raised by expert maintainers during historical RFC reviews. SpecBench contains tasks from 5 diverse repositories: Kubernetes, React, Rust, TVM, and vLLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art SWE agents on SpecBench, analyzing their capacity to reason about system design without execution feedback. The best performing agent, GPT-5.4, achieves 44.4% accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30314
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SpecBench: Evaluating Specification-Level Reasoning for Software Engineering LLM Agents
Hamblin, Grant
Song, Kevin
Zhu, Zhanda
Jayarajan, Anand
Liu, Sihang
Vijaykumar, Nandita
Pekhimenko, Gennady
Multiagent Systems
Software engineering (SWE) agents are transitioning from code generation to full software development lifecycle automation. A critical phase in this lifecycle is specification design: transforming initial proposals into carefully considered requirements through expert review. Existing benchmarks such as SWE-Bench are implementation-focused by measuring the agent's ability to generate code given fixed, precise design requirements. This formulation assumes specifications are correct and complete. In real-world complex and critical software systems, initial specifications are often incomplete and flawed, requiring extensive expert reviews and revisions before being accepted for implementation. To fill this gap, we introduce SpecBench to evaluate specification-level reasoning: the ability to generate complete, unambiguous, consistent, and correct system specifications. SpecBench tasks are derived from the Request for Comments (RFC) process used by mature open-source projects. For each task, an agent is given an initial design proposal, the project codebase, and all past project RFC discussions. The agent is tasked with identifying specification deficiencies: omissions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, or incorrect assumptions in the initial proposal. We evaluate predictions against critiques raised by expert maintainers during historical RFC reviews. SpecBench contains tasks from 5 diverse repositories: Kubernetes, React, Rust, TVM, and vLLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art SWE agents on SpecBench, analyzing their capacity to reason about system design without execution feedback. The best performing agent, GPT-5.4, achieves 44.4% accuracy.
title SpecBench: Evaluating Specification-Level Reasoning for Software Engineering LLM Agents
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30314