Daily Papers

We introduce WildAGTEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents' function-calling capabilities under realistic API complexity. Unlike prior work that assumes an idealized API system and disregards real-world factors such as noisy API outputs, WildAGTEval accounts for two dimensions of real-world complexity: 1. API specification, which includes detailed documentation and usage constraints, and 2. API execution, which captures runtime challenges. Consequently, WildAGTEval offers (i) an API system encompassing 60 distinct complexity scenarios that can be composed into approximately 32K test configurations, and (ii) user-agent interactions for evaluating LLM agents on these scenarios. Using WildAGTEval, we systematically assess several advanced LLMs and observe that most scenarios are challenging, with irrelevant information complexity posing the greatest difficulty and reducing the performance of strong LLMs by 27.3%. Furthermore, our qualitative analysis reveals that LLMs occasionally distort user intent merely to claim task completion, critically affecting user satisfaction.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been extended beyond traditional text generation to serve as interactive agents capable of using external tools based on user intent. However, current LLM agents still show limited ability to handle goal-oriented queries, which require decomposing a high-level objective into multiple interdependent API calls with correct planning and execution. Current approaches mainly rely on zero-shot evaluation due to the absence of training data. While proprietary closed-source models such as GPT-4 demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, smaller open-source models struggle to perform complex tool use effectively. Thus, we propose a novel training framework GOAT, which enables fine-tuning of LLM agents in a human annotation-free setting. GOAT automatically constructs synthetic datasets of goal-oriented API execution tasks directly from given API documents, equipping models with the ability to reason over interdependent calls and generate coherent responses. Through extensive experiments, we show that GOAT-trained agents achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple existing goal-oriented benchmarks. In addition, we introduce GOATBench, a new goal-oriented API execution benchmark, and demonstrate that agents trained with GOAT also excel in this setting. These results highlight GOAT as a practical path toward building robust open-source LLM agents capable of complex reasoning and tool use.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in decision-making and reasoning, particularly when integrated with various tools to effectively solve complex problems. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs' tool usage face several limitations: (1) limited evaluation scenarios, often lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; (2) narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLMs use tools; and (3) reliance on LLMs or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce ACEBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing tool usage in LLMs. ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. "Normal" evaluates tool usage in basic scenarios; "Special" evaluates tool usage in situations with ambiguous or incomplete instructions; "Agent" evaluates tool usage through multi-agent interactions to simulate real-world, multi-turn dialogues. We conducted extensive experiments using ACEBench, analyzing various LLMs in-depth and providing a more granular examination of error causes across different data types.

Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .

Interacting with a software system via a chatbot can be challenging, especially when the chatbot needs to generate API calls, in the right order and with the right parameters, to communicate with the system. API calling in chatbot systems poses significant challenges, particularly in complex, multi-step tasks requiring accurate API selection and execution. We contribute to this domain in three ways: first, by introducing a novel dataset designed to assess models on API function selection, parameter generation, and nested API calls; second, by benchmarking state-of-the-art language models across varying levels of complexity to evaluate their performance in API function generation and parameter accuracy; and third, by proposing an enhanced API routing method that combines general-purpose large language models for API selection with fine-tuned models for parameter generation and some prompt engineering approach. These approaches lead to substantial improvements in handling complex API tasks, offering practical advancements for real-world API-driven chatbot systems.

We present Agent-Diff, a novel benchmarking framework for evaluating agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) on real-world tasks that execute code via external APIs. Agentic LLM performance varies due to differences in models, external tool access, prompt structures, and agentic frameworks. Benchmarks must make fundamental trade-offs between a sandboxed approach that controls for variation in software environments and more ecologically valid approaches employing real services. Agent-Diff attempts to capture the desirable features of both of these approaches by including access to the real API interfaces for software services while sandboxing the environment in which calls are made, processed, and evaluated. This approach relies on two key innovations. The first is a novel state-diff contract, which separates process from outcome - rather than fuzzy trace or parameter matching, we define task success as whether the expected change in environment state was achieved. The second is a novel sandbox that provides a standardized scripting layer that all models use to execute code against external APIs (Slack, Box, Linear, Google Calendar). Thus, we can evaluate different agentic LLMs against a standardized set of contracts using a unified sandbox while still evaluating their performance on real-world service interfaces. Using the Agent-Diff framework, we provide benchmarks for nine LLMs across 224 tasks utilizing enterprise software workflows. In addition, we evaluate the robustness of the framework with ablation experiments to assess the contribution of access to API documentation on benchmark performance. Code and data: https://github.com/agent-diff-bench/agent-diff.

Answering visual queries is a complex task that requires both visual processing and reasoning. End-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task, do not explicitly differentiate between the two, limiting interpretability and generalization. Learning modular programs presents a promising alternative, but has proven challenging due to the difficulty of learning both the programs and modules simultaneously. We introduce ViperGPT, a framework that leverages code-generation models to compose vision-and-language models into subroutines to produce a result for any query. ViperGPT utilizes a provided API to access the available modules, and composes them by generating Python code that is later executed. This simple approach requires no further training, and achieves state-of-the-art results across various complex visual tasks.

The proliferation of autonomous AI agents capable of executing real-world actions - filesystem operations, API calls, database modifications, financial transactions - introduces a class of safety risk not addressed by existing content-moderation infrastructure. Current text-safety systems evaluate linguistic content for harm categories such as violence, hate speech, and sexual content; they are architecturally unsuitable for evaluating whether a proposed action falls within an agent's authorized operational scope. We present ILION (Intelligent Logic Identity Operations Network), a deterministic execution gate for agentic AI systems. ILION employs a five-component cascade architecture - Transient Identity Imprint (TII), Semantic Vector Reference Frame (SVRF), Identity Drift Control (IDC), Identity Resonance Score (IRS) and Consensus Veto Layer (CVL) - to classify proposed agent actions as BLOCK or ALLOW without statistical training or API dependencies. The system requires zero labeled data, operates in sub-millisecond latency, and produces fully interpretable verdicts. We evaluate ILION on ILION-Bench v2, a purpose-built benchmark of 380 test scenarios across eight attack categories with 39% hard-difficulty adversarial cases and a held-out development split. ILION achieves F1 = 0.8515, precision = 91.0%, and a false positive rate of 7.9% at a mean latency of 143 microseconds. Comparative evaluation against three baselines - Lakera Guard (F1 = 0.8087), OpenAI Moderation API (F1 = 0.1188), and Llama Guard 3 (F1 = 0.0105) - demonstrates that existing text-safety infrastructure systematically fails on agent execution safety tasks due to a fundamental task mismatch. ILION outperforms the best commercial baseline by 4.3 F1 points while operating 2,000 times faster with a false positive rate four times lower.

AI agents that pay for resources via the x402 protocol embed payment metadata - resource URLs, descriptions, and reason strings - in every HTTP payment request. This metadata is transmitted to the payment server and to the centralised facilitator API before any on-chain settlement occurs; neither party is typically bound by a data processing agreement. We present presidio-hardened-x402, the first open-source middleware that intercepts x402 payment requests before transmission to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII), enforce declarative spending policies, and block duplicate replay attempts. To evaluate the PII filter, we construct a labeled synthetic corpus of 2,000 x402 metadata triples spanning seven use-case categories, and run a 42-configuration precision/recall sweep across two detection modes (regex, NLP) and five confidence thresholds. The recommended configuration (mode=nlp, min_score=0.4, all entity types) achieves micro-F1 = 0.894 with precision 0.972, at a p99 latency of 5.73ms - well within the 50ms overhead budget. The middleware, corpus, and all experiment code are publicly available at https://github.com/presidio-v/presidio-hardened-x402.

This paper introduces RobotIQ, a framework that empowers mobile robots with human-level planning capabilities, enabling seamless communication via natural language instructions through any Large Language Model. The proposed framework is designed in the ROS architecture and aims to bridge the gap between humans and robots, enabling robots to comprehend and execute user-expressed text or voice commands. Our research encompasses a wide spectrum of robotic tasks, ranging from fundamental logical, mathematical, and learning reasoning for transferring knowledge in domains like navigation, manipulation, and object localization, enabling the application of learned behaviors from simulated environments to real-world operations. All encapsulated within a modular crafted robot library suite of API-wise control functions, RobotIQ offers a fully functional AI-ROS-based toolset that allows researchers to design and develop their own robotic actions tailored to specific applications and robot configurations. The effectiveness of the proposed system was tested and validated both in simulated and real-world experiments focusing on a home service scenario that included an assistive application designed for elderly people. RobotIQ with an open-source, easy-to-use, and adaptable robotic library suite for any robot can be found at https://github.com/emmarapt/RobotIQ.

AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy tool outputs. We address this gap by manually annotating failed agent runs and release a novel benchmark of 115 failed trajectories spanning structured API workflows, incident management, and open-ended web/file tasks. Each trajectory is annotated with a critical failure step and a category from a grounded-theory derived, cross-domain failure taxonomy. To mitigate the human cost of failure attribution, we present AGENTRX, an automated domain-agnostic diagnostic framework that pinpoints the critical failure step in a failed agent trajectory. It synthesizes constraints, evaluates them step-by-step, and produces an auditable validation log of constraint violations with associated evidence; an LLM-based judge uses this log to localize the critical step and category. Our framework improves step localization and failure attribution over existing baselines across three domains.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for cre- ating dynamic non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming environments, enabling both func- tional task execution and persona-consistent dialogue generation. In this paper, we (Tu_Character_lab) report our participation in the Commonsense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025 Round 2, which eval- uates agents across three tracks: task-oriented dialogue, context-aware dialogue, and their integration. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: (i) lightweight prompting techniques in the API track, including a Deflanderization prompting method to suppress excessive role-play and improve task fidelity, and (ii) fine-tuned large models in the GPU track, leveraging Qwen3-14B with supervisedfinetuning (SFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA). Our best submissions ranked 2nd on Task 1, 2nd on Task 3 (API track), and 4th on Task 3 (GPU track).

The advanced function-calling capabilities of foundation models open up new possibilities for deploying agents to perform complex API tasks. However, managing large amounts of data and interacting with numerous APIs makes function calling hardware-intensive and costly, especially on edge devices. Current Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with function calling at the edge because they cannot handle complex inputs or manage multiple tools effectively. This results in low task-completion accuracy, increased delays, and higher power consumption. In this work, we introduce Less-is-More, a novel fine-tuning-free function-calling scheme for dynamic tool selection. Our approach is based on the key insight that selectively reducing the number of tools available to LLMs significantly improves their function-calling performance, execution time, and power efficiency on edge devices. Experimental results with state-of-the-art LLMs on edge hardware show agentic success rate improvements, with execution time reduced by up to 70% and power consumption by up to 40%.

Tool calling has emerged as a critical capability for AI agents to interact with the real world and solve complex tasks. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a powerful standardized framework for tool integration, there is a significant gap in benchmarking how well AI agents can effectively solve multi-step tasks using diverse MCP tools in realistic, dynamic scenarios. In this work, we present LiveMCP-101, a benchmark of 101 carefully curated real-world queries, refined through iterative LLM rewriting and manual review, that require coordinated use of multiple MCP tools including web search, file operations, mathematical reasoning, and data analysis. Moreover, we introduce a novel evaluation approach that leverages ground-truth execution plans rather than raw API outputs, better reflecting the evolving nature of real-world environments. Experiments show that even frontier LLMs achieve a success rate below 60\%, highlighting major challenges in tool orchestration. Detailed ablations and error analysis further reveal distinct failure modes and inefficiencies in token usage, pointing to concrete directions for advancing current models. LiveMCP-101 sets a rigorous standard for evaluating real-world agent capabilities, advancing toward autonomous AI systems that reliably execute complex tasks through tool use.

Recent large language models (LLMs) advancements sparked a growing research interest in tool assisted LLMs solving real-world challenges, which calls for comprehensive evaluation of tool-use capabilities. While previous works focused on either evaluating over stateless web services (RESTful API), based on a single turn user prompt, or an off-policy dialog trajectory, ToolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools, a built-in user simulator supporting on-policy conversational evaluation and a dynamic evaluation strategy for intermediate and final milestones over an arbitrary trajectory. We show that open source and proprietary models have a significant performance gap, and complex tasks like State Dependency, Canonicalization and Insufficient Information defined in ToolSandbox are challenging even the most capable SOTA LLMs, providing brand-new insights into tool-use LLM capabilities. ToolSandbox evaluation framework is released at https://github.com/apple/ToolSandbox

This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) in generating code from algorithm descriptions from recent NLP papers. The task requires two key competencies: (1) algorithm comprehension: synthesizing information from papers and academic literature to understand implementation logic, and (2) coding expertise: identifying dependencies and correctly implementing necessary APIs. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciReplicate-Bench, a benchmark of 100 tasks from 36 NLP papers published in 2024, featuring detailed annotations and comprehensive test cases. Building on SciReplicate-Bench, we propose Sci-Reproducer, a multi-agent framework consisting of a Paper Agent that interprets algorithmic concepts from literature and a Code Agent that retrieves dependencies from repositories and implement solutions. To assess algorithm understanding, we introduce reasoning graph accuracy, which quantifies similarity between generated and reference reasoning graphs derived from code comments and structure. For evaluating implementation quality, we employ execution accuracy, CodeBLEU, and repository dependency/API recall metrics. In our experiments, we evaluate various powerful Non-Reasoning LLMs and Reasoning LLMs as foundational models. The best-performing LLM using Sci-Reproducer achieves only 39% execution accuracy, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty.Our analysis identifies missing or inconsistent algorithm descriptions as key barriers to successful reproduction. We will open-source our benchmark, and code at https://github.com/xyzCS/SciReplicate-Bench.

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their application to IoT and automation systems, particularly for facilitating device management through natural language instructions. However, existing centralized approaches face significant scalability challenges when managing and coordinating the collaboration between IoT devices of diverse capabilities in large-scale heterogeneous IoT systems. This paper introduces LLMind 2.0, a distributed IoT automation framework that addresses the scalability challenges through lightweight LLM-empowered device agents via natural language-based machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Unlike previous LLM-controlled automation systems that rely on a centralized coordinator to generate device-specific code to be executed on individual devices, LLMind 2.0 distributes intelligence across individual devices through lightweight LLMs embedded in IoT devices. The central coordinator translates human instructions into simple subtasks described in natural human language, which are then processed by device-specific agents to generate device-specific code locally at the associated devices. This approach transcends device heterogeneity barriers by using natural language as a unified communication medium, enabling seamless collaboration between devices from different manufacturers. The system incorporates several key innovations: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism for accurate subtask-to-API mapping, fine-tuned lightweight LLMs for reliable code generation, and a finite state machine-based task execution framework. Experimental validation in multi-robot warehouse scenarios and real-world WiFi network deployments demonstrates significant improvements in scalability, reliability, and privacy protection compared to the centralized approach.

To facilitate the transformation of legacy finite difference implementations into the Devito environment, this study develops an integrated AI agent framework. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and open-source Large Language Models are combined through multi-stage iterative workflows in the system's hybrid LangGraph architecture. The agent constructs an extensive Devito knowledge graph through document parsing, structure-aware segmentation, extraction of entity relationships, and Leiden-based community detection. GraphRAG optimisation enhances query performance across semantic communities that include seismic wave simulation, computational fluid dynamics, and performance tuning libraries. A reverse engineering component derives three-level query strategies for RAG retrieval through static analysis of Fortran source code. To deliver precise contextual information for language model guidance, the multi-stage retrieval pipeline performs parallel searching, concept expansion, community-scale retrieval, and semantic similarity analysis. Code synthesis is governed by Pydantic-based constraints to guarantee structured outputs and reliability. A comprehensive validation framework integrates conventional static analysis with the G-Eval approach, covering execution correctness, structural soundness, mathematical consistency, and API compliance. The overall agent workflow is implemented on the LangGraph framework and adopts concurrent processing to support quality-based iterative refinement and state-aware dynamic routing. The principal contribution lies in the incorporation of feedback mechanisms motivated by reinforcement learning, enabling a transition from static code translation toward dynamic and adaptive analytical behavior.

Software testing plays a critical role in ensuring that systems behave as intended. However, existing automated testing approaches struggle to match the capabilities of human engineers due to key limitations such as test locality, lack of general reliability, and business logic blindness. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages functional programming and type systems to translate Scala backend code into formal Lean representations. Our pipeline automatically generates theorems that specify the intended behavior of APIs and database operations, and uses LLM-based provers to verify them. When a theorem is proved, the corresponding logic is guaranteed to be correct and no further testing is needed. If the negation of a theorem is proved instead, it confirms a bug. In cases where neither can be proved, human intervention is required. We evaluate our method on realistic backend systems and find that it can formally verify over 50% of the test requirements, which suggests that half of a testing engineer's workload can be automated. Additionally, with an average cost of only $2.19 per API, LLM-based verification is significantly more cost-effective than manual testing and can be scaled easily through parallel execution. Our results indicate a promising direction for scalable, AI-powered software testing, with the potential to greatly improve engineering productivity as models continue to advance.

AI Agents can perform complex operations at great speed, but just like all the humans we have ever hired, their intelligence remains fallible. Miscommunications aren't noticed, systemic biases have no counter-action, and inner monologues are rarely written down. We did not come to fire them for their mistakes, but to hire them and provide a safe productive working environment. We posit that we can reuse a common corporate organizational structure: teams of independent AI agents with strict role boundaries can work with common goals, but opposing incentives. Multiple models serving as a team of rivals can catch and minimize errors within the final product at a small cost to the velocity of actions. In this paper we demonstrate that we can achieve reliability without acquiring perfect components, but through careful orchestration of imperfect ones. This paper describes the architecture of such a system in practice: specialized agent teams (planners, executors, critics, experts), organized into an organization with clear goals, coordinated through a remote code executor that keeps data transformations and tool invocations separate from reasoning models. Rather than agents directly calling tools and ingesting full responses, they write code that executes remotely; only relevant summaries return to agent context. By preventing raw data and tool outputs from contaminating context windows, the system maintains clean separation between perception (brains that plan and reason) and execution (hands that perform heavy data transformations and API calls). We demonstrate the approach achieves over 90% internal error interception prior to user exposure while maintaining acceptable latency tradeoffs. A survey from our traces shows that we only trade off cost and latency to achieve correctness and incrementally expand capabilities without impacting existing ones.

Existing benchmarks for tool-using LLM agents primarily report single-run success rates and miss reliability properties required in production. We introduce ReliabilityBench, a benchmark for evaluating agent reliability across three dimensions: (i) consistency under repeated execution using pass^k, (ii) robustness to semantically equivalent task perturbations at intensity ε, and (iii) fault tolerance under controlled tool/API failures at intensity λ. ReliabilityBench contributes a unified reliability surface R(k,ε,λ), action metamorphic relations that define correctness via end-state equivalence rather than text similarity, and a chaos-engineering-style fault injection framework (timeouts, rate limits, partial responses, schema drift). We evaluate two models (Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT-4o) and two agent architectures (ReAct, Reflexion) across four domains (scheduling, travel, customer support, e-commerce) over 1,280 episodes. Perturbations alone reduce success from 96.9% at ε=0 to 88.1% at ε=0.2. Rate limiting is the most damaging fault in ablations. ReAct is more robust than Reflexion under combined stress, and Gemini 2.0 Flash achieves comparable reliability to GPT-4o at much lower cost. ReliabilityBench provides a systematic framework for assessing production readiness of LLM agents.

Recent advances in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, driven by large language models (LLMs) with extensive API and tool integration, have enabled conversational agents to coordinate interleaved goals, maintain long-horizon context, and act proactively through asynchronous execution. These capabilities extend beyond traditional TOD systems, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic support for evaluating such agentic behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce ATOD, a benchmark and synthetic dialogue generation pipeline that produces richly annotated conversations requiring long-term reasoning. ATOD captures key characteristics of advanced TOD, including multi-goal coordination, dependency management, memory, adaptability, and proactivity. Building on ATOD, we propose ATOD-Eval, a holistic evaluation framework that translates these dimensions into fine-grained metrics and supports reproducible offline and online evaluation. We further present a strong agentic memory-based evaluator for benchmarking on ATOD. Experiments show that ATOD-Eval enables comprehensive assessment across task completion, agentic capability, and response quality, and that the proposed evaluator offers a better accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to existing memory- and LLM-based approaches under this evaluation setting.

Agentic systems increasingly rely on reusable procedural capabilities, a.k.a., agentic skills, to execute long-horizon workflows reliably. These capabilities are callable modules that package procedural knowledge with explicit applicability conditions, execution policies, termination criteria, and reusable interfaces. Unlike one-off plans or atomic tool calls, skills operate (and often do well) across tasks. This paper maps the skill layer across the full lifecycle (discovery, practice, distillation, storage, composition, evaluation, and update) and introduces two complementary taxonomies. The first is a system-level set of seven design patterns capturing how skills are packaged and executed in practice, from metadata-driven progressive disclosure and executable code skills to self-evolving libraries and marketplace distribution. The second is an orthogonal representation times scope taxonomy describing what skills are (natural language, code, policy, hybrid) and what environments they operate over (web, OS, software engineering, robotics). We analyze the security and governance implications of skill-based agents, covering supply-chain risks, prompt injection via skill payloads, and trust-tiered execution, grounded by a case study of the ClawHavoc campaign in which nearly 1{,}200 malicious skills infiltrated a major agent marketplace, exfiltrating API keys, cryptocurrency wallets, and browser credentials at scale. We further survey deterministic evaluation approaches, anchored by recent benchmark evidence that curated skills can substantially improve agent success rates while self-generated skills may degrade them. We conclude with open challenges toward robust, verifiable, and certifiable skills for real-world autonomous agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex dependency relationship between different APIs. However, it is essential to utilize multiple APIs collaboratively from various sources (e.g., different Apps in the iPhone), especially for complex user instructions. In this paper, we introduce AppBench, the first benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user's task. Specifically, we consider two significant challenges in multiple APIs: 1) graph structures: some APIs can be executed independently while others need to be executed one by one, resulting in graph-like execution order; and 2) permission constraints: which source is authorized to execute the API call. We have experimental results on 9 distinct LLMs; e.g., GPT-4o achieves only a 2.0\% success rate at the most complex instruction, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ruleGreen/AppBench.

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

Recent advancements in integrating large language models (LLMs) with application programming interfaces (APIs) have gained significant interest in both academia and industry. These API-based agents, leveraging the strong autonomy and planning capabilities of LLMs, can efficiently solve problems requiring multi-step actions. However, their ability to handle multi-dimensional difficulty levels, diverse task types, and real-world demands through APIs remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce ShortcutsBench, a large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of API-based agents in solving tasks with varying levels of difficulty, diverse task types, and real-world demands. ShortcutsBench includes a wealth of real APIs from Apple Inc.'s operating systems, refined user queries from shortcuts, human-annotated high-quality action sequences from shortcut developers, and accurate parameter filling values about primitive parameter types, enum parameter types, outputs from previous actions, and parameters that need to request necessary information from the system or user. Our extensive evaluation of agents built with 5 leading open-source (size >= 57B) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g. Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-3.5) reveals significant limitations in handling complex queries related to API selection, parameter filling, and requesting necessary information from systems and users. These findings highlight the challenges that API-based agents face in effectively fulfilling real and complex user queries. All datasets, code, and experimental results will be available at https://github.com/eachsheep/shortcutsbench.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools and APIs to execute complex tasks specified in natural language. Evaluating such tool calling capabilities in realistic enterprise settings is challenging: APIs are often proprietary, heterogeneous, and difficult to share, limiting reproducible benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Live API Bench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed by transforming NL2SQL datasets into interactive API environments. Our pipeline converts SQL queries from BIRD SQL into executable API sequences across three formulations SLOT, SEL, and REST covering minimal general purpose operations, domain specific multi step tasks, and function oriented RESTful interactions, respectively. The benchmark spans 11 databases with over 2,500 invocable tools, paired with human authored queries, ground truth API sequences, and verified final answers. Live API Bench enables systematic evaluation of core challenges in tool use, including error handling, sequential reasoning, parameter generation, response parsing, and robustness across diverse domains. We evaluate 10 LLMs and 4 ReACT agents, observing low task completion rates (7 to 47pct), which improve modestly to 50pct under interactive agent settings, highlighting substantial scope for improving LLM tool calling performance. We release all code and data associated with this paper.

Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-trained models can understand and perform code execution. We develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a large-scale and realistic Python dataset and task for code execution, which challenges existing models such as Codex. We then present CodeExecutor, a Transformer model that leverages code execution pre-training and curriculum learning to enhance its semantic comprehension. We evaluate CodeExecutor on code execution and show its promising performance and limitations. We also demonstrate its potential benefits for code intelligence tasks such as zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to-code generation. Our analysis provides insights into the learning and generalization abilities of pre-trained models for code execution.

With the rise of software-as-a-service and microservice architectures, RESTful APIs are now ubiquitous in mobile and web applications. A service can have tens or hundreds of API methods, making it a challenge for programmers to find the right combination of methods to solve their task. We present APIphany, a component-based synthesizer for programs that compose calls to RESTful APIs. The main innovation behind APIphany is the use of precise semantic types, both to specify user intent and to direct the search. APIphany contributes three novel mechanisms to overcome challenges in adapting component-based synthesis to the REST domain: (1) a type inference algorithm for augmenting REST specifications with semantic types; (2) an efficient synthesis technique for "wrangling" semi-structured data, which is commonly required in working with RESTful APIs; and (3) a new form of simulated execution to avoid executing APIs calls during synthesis. We evaluate APIphany on three real-world APIs and 32 tasks extracted from GitHub repositories and StackOverflow. In our experiments, APIphany found correct solutions to 29 tasks, with 23 of them reported among top ten synthesis results.

REST APIs have become key components of web services. However, they often contain logic flaws resulting in server side errors or security vulnerabilities. HTTP requests are used as test cases to find and mitigate such issues. Existing methods to modify requests, including those using deep learning, suffer from limited performance and precision, relying on undirected search or making limited usage of the contextual information. In this paper we propose APIRL, a fully automated deep reinforcement learning tool for testing REST APIs. A key novelty of our approach is the use of feedback from a transformer module pre-trained on JSON-structured data, akin to that used in API responses. This allows APIRL to learn the subtleties relating to test outcomes, and generalise to unseen API endpoints. We show APIRL can find significantly more bugs than the state-of-the-art in real world REST APIs while minimising the number of required test cases. We also study how reward functions, and other key design choices, affect learnt policies in a thorough ablation study.

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072.

This paper presents Okapi, a new dataset for Natural Language to executable web Application Programming Interfaces (NL2API). This dataset is in English and contains 22,508 questions and 9,019 unique API calls, covering three domains. We define new compositional generalization tasks for NL2API which explore the models' ability to extrapolate from simple API calls in the training set to new and more complex API calls in the inference phase. Also, the models are required to generate API calls that execute correctly as opposed to the existing approaches which evaluate queries with placeholder values. Our dataset is different than most of the existing compositional semantic parsing datasets because it is a non-synthetic dataset studying the compositional generalization in a low-resource setting. Okapi is a step towards creating realistic datasets and benchmarks for studying compositional generalization alongside the existing datasets and tasks. We report the generalization capabilities of sequence-to-sequence baseline models trained on a variety of the SCAN and Okapi datasets tasks. The best model achieves 15\% exact match accuracy when generalizing from simple API calls to more complex API calls. This highlights some challenges for future research. Okapi dataset and tasks are publicly available at https://aka.ms/nl2api/data.

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex and GPT-4, have recently showcased their remarkable code generation abilities, facilitating a significant boost in coding efficiency. This paper will delve into utilizing LLMs for code generation in private libraries, as they are widely employed in everyday programming. Despite their remarkable capabilities, generating such private APIs poses a formidable conundrum for LLMs, as they inherently lack exposure to these private libraries during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that emulates the process of programmers writing private code. This framework comprises two modules: APIFinder first retrieves potentially useful APIs from API documentation; and APICoder then leverages these retrieved APIs to generate private code. Specifically, APIFinder employs vector retrieval techniques and allows user involvement in the retrieval process. For APICoder, it can directly utilize off-the-shelf code generation models. To further cultivate explicit proficiency in invoking APIs from prompts, we continuously pre-train a reinforced version of APICoder, named CodeGenAPI. Our goal is to train the above two modules on vast public libraries, enabling generalization to private ones. Meanwhile, we create four private library benchmarks, including TorchDataEval, TorchDataComplexEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval, and meticulously handcraft test cases for each benchmark to support comprehensive evaluations. Numerous experiments on the four benchmarks consistently affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, deeper analysis is also conducted to glean additional insights.

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

In this paper, we describe Function Assistant, a lightweight Python-based toolkit for querying and exploring source code repositories using natural language. The toolkit is designed to help end-users of a target API quickly find information about functions through high-level natural language queries and descriptions. For a given text query and background API, the tool finds candidate functions by performing a translation from the text to known representations in the API using the semantic parsing approach of Richardson and Kuhn (2017). Translations are automatically learned from example text-code pairs in example APIs. The toolkit includes features for building translation pipelines and query engines for arbitrary source code projects. To explore this last feature, we perform new experiments on 27 well-known Python projects hosted on Github.

Large language models (LLMs) have limitations in handling tasks that require real-time access to external APIs. While several benchmarks like ToolBench and APIGen have been developed to assess LLMs' API-use capabilities, they often suffer from issues such as lack of generalizability, limited multi-step reasoning coverage, and instability due to real-time API fluctuations. In this paper, we introduce SEAL, an end-to-end testbed designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world API usage. SEAL standardizes existing benchmarks, integrates an agent system for testing API retrieval and planning, and addresses the instability of real-time APIs by introducing a GPT-4-powered API simulator with caching for deterministic evaluations. Our testbed provides a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that covers API retrieval, API calls, and final responses, offering a reliable framework for structured performance comparison in diverse real-world scenarios. SEAL is publicly available, with ongoing updates for new benchmarks.

Code Executing Reasoning is becoming a new non-functional metric that assesses the ability of large language models (LLMs) in programming tasks. State-of-the-art frameworks (CodeMind or REval) and benchmarks (CruxEval) usually focus on LLM's prediction of a given code's input/output or intermediate variable states/values on limited programs. However, there is no tool for more in-depth analysis of the results. Without such a tool, the observations about LLM's code execution reasoning cannot be generalized to more datasets, preventing the research community and practitioners from devising the next generation of LLMs with better code execution reasoning abilities. This paper introduces ExeRScope, a series of tools and heuristics to analyze the result of code execution reasoning frameworks to understand better the impact of code properties in the studied benchmarks on the code execution reasoning. With such tooling, analysis can be generalized to code with similar properties without the urgent need to design more benchmarks, which is a cumbersome effort.

Current search techniques are limited to standard RAG query-document applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to expand the code and index for predicting the required APIs, directly enabling high-quality, end-to-end code generation for auto-completion and agentic AI applications. We address the problem of API leaks in current code-to-code benchmark datasets by introducing a new dataset built from real-world ServiceNow Script Includes that capture the challenge of unclear API usage intent in the code. Our evaluation metrics show that this method achieves 87.86% top-40 retrieval accuracy, allowing the critical context with APIs needed for successful downstream code generation. To enable real-time predictions, we develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline that optimizes a compact 0.6B reranker through synthetic dataset generation, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. This approach enables our compact reranker to outperform a much larger 8B model while maintaining 2.5x reduced latency, effectively addressing the nuances of enterprise-specific code without the computational overhead of larger models.

Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another interface designed specifically for machine interaction with online content: application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper we ask -- what if we were to take tasks traditionally tackled by browsing agents, and give AI agents access to APIs? To do so, we propose two varieties of agents: (1) an API-calling agent that attempts to perform online tasks through APIs only, similar to traditional coding agents, and (2) a Hybrid Agent that can interact with online data through both web browsing and APIs. In experiments on WebArena, a widely-used and realistic benchmark for web navigation tasks, we find that API-based agents outperform web browsing agents. Hybrid Agents out-perform both others nearly uniformly across tasks, resulting in a more than 20.0% absolute improvement over web browsing alone, achieving a success rate of 35.8%, achiving the SOTA performance among task-agnostic agents. These results strongly suggest that when APIs are available, they present an attractive alternative to relying on web browsing alone.

We introduce API Pack, a multilingual dataset featuring over one million instruction-API call pairs aimed at advancing large language models' API call generation capabilities. Through experiments, we demonstrate API Pack's efficacy in enhancing models for this specialized task while maintaining their overall proficiency at general coding. Fine-tuning CodeLlama-13B on just 20,000 Python instances yields over 10% and 5% higher accuracy than GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 respectively in generating unseen API calls. Scaling to 100k examples improves generalization to new APIs not seen during training. In addition, cross-lingual API call generation is achieved without needing extensive data per language. The dataset, fine-tuned models, and overall code base are publicly available at https://github.com/zguo0525/API-Pack.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a result, several automatic comment generation models are developed as a solution. The recent models explore the integration of external knowledge resources such as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to improve the generated comments. In this paper, we propose API2Com, a model that leverages the Application Programming Interface Documentations (API Docs) as a knowledge resource for comment generation. The API Docs include the description of the methods in more details and therefore, can provide better context in the generated comments. The API Docs are used along with the code snippets and Abstract Syntax Trees in our model. We apply the model on a large Java dataset of over 130,000 methods and evaluate it using both Transformer and RNN-base architectures. Interestingly, when API Docs are used, the performance increase is negligible. We therefore run different experiments to reason about the results. For methods that only contain one API, adding API Docs improves the results by 4% BLEU score on average (BLEU score is an automatic evaluation metric used in machine translation). However, as the number of APIs that are used in a method increases, the performance of the model in generating comments decreases due to long documentations used in the input. Our results confirm that the API Docs can be useful in generating better comments, but, new techniques are required to identify the most informative ones in a method rather than using all documentations simultaneously.

Automatic API method recommendation is an essential task of code intelligence, which aims to suggest suitable APIs for programming queries. Existing approaches can be categorized into two primary groups: retrieval-based and learning-based approaches. Although these approaches have achieved remarkable success, they still come with notable limitations. The retrieval-based approaches rely on the text representation capabilities of embedding models, while the learning-based approaches require extensive task-specific labeled data for training. To mitigate the limitations, we propose APIGen, a generative API recommendation approach through enhanced in-context learning (ICL). APIGen involves two main components: (1) Diverse Examples Selection. APIGen searches for similar posts to the programming queries from the lexical, syntactical, and semantic perspectives, providing more informative examples for ICL. (2) Guided API Recommendation. APIGen enables large language models (LLMs) to perform reasoning before generating API recommendations, where the reasoning involves fine-grained matching between the task intent behind the queries and the factual knowledge of the APIs. With the reasoning process, APIGen makes recommended APIs better meet the programming requirement of queries and also enhances the interpretability of results. We compare APIGen with four existing approaches on two publicly available benchmarks. Experiments show that APIGen outperforms the best baseline CLEAR by 105.8% in method-level API recommendation and 54.3% in class-level API recommendation in terms of SuccessRate@1. Besides, APIGen achieves an average 49.87% increase compared to the zero-shot performance of popular LLMs such as GPT-4 in method-level API recommendation regarding the SuccessRate@3 metric.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced capabilities in function-calling, these advancements primarily rely on accessing the functions' responses. This methodology is practical for simpler APIs but faces scalability issues with irreversible APIs that significantly impact the system, such as a database deletion API. Similarly, processes requiring extensive time for each API call and those necessitating forward planning, like automated action pipelines, present complex challenges. Furthermore, scenarios often arise where a generalized approach is needed because algorithms lack direct access to the specific implementations of these functions or secrets to use them. Traditional tool planning methods are inadequate in these cases, compelling the need to operate within black-box environments. Unlike their performance in tool manipulation, LLMs excel in black-box tasks, such as program synthesis. Therefore, we harness the program synthesis capabilities of LLMs to strategize tool usage in black-box settings, ensuring solutions are verified prior to implementation. We introduce TOPGUN, an ingeniously crafted approach leveraging program synthesis for black box tool planning. Accompanied by SwissNYF, a comprehensive suite that integrates black-box algorithms for planning and verification tasks, addressing the aforementioned challenges and enhancing the versatility and effectiveness of LLMs in complex API interactions. The public code for SwissNYF is available at https://github.com/iclr-dummy-user/SwissNYF.

Context: Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers are able to specialize the code they generate according to a continuous profiling of the running programs. This gives them an advantage when compared to Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilers that must choose the code to generate once for all. Inquiry: Is it possible to improve the performance of AoT compilers by adding Dynamic Binary Modification (DBM) to the executions? Approach: We added to the Hopc AoT JavaScript compiler a new optimization based on DBM to the inline cache (IC), a classical optimization dynamic languages use to implement object property accesses efficiently. Knowledge: Reducing the number of memory accesses as the new optimization does, does not shorten execution times on contemporary architectures. Grounding: The DBM optimization we have implemented is fully operational on x86_64 architectures. We have conducted several experiments to evaluate its impact on performance and to study the reasons of the lack of acceleration. Importance: The (negative) result we present in this paper sheds new light on the best strategy to be used to implement dynamic languages. It tells that the old days were removing instructions or removing memory reads always yielded to speed up is over. Nowadays, implementing sophisticated compiler optimizations is only worth the effort if the processor is not able by itself to accelerate the code. This result applies to AoT compilers as well as JIT compilers.

We present the first systematic approach to static and dynamic taint analysis for Graph APIs focusing on broken access control. The approach comprises the following. We taint nodes in the Graph API if they represent data requiring specific privileges in order to be retrieved or manipulated, and identify API calls which are related to sources and sinks. Then, we statically analyze whether tainted information flow between API source and sink calls occurs. To this end, we model the API calls using graph transformation rules. We subsequently use critical pair analysis to automatically analyze potential dependencies between rules representing source calls and rules representing sink calls. We distinguish direct from indirect tainted information flow and argue under which conditions the CPA is able to detect not only direct, but also indirect tainted flow. The static taint analysis (i) identifies flows that need to be further reviewed, since tainted nodes may be created by an API call and used or manipulated by another API call later without having the necessary privileges, and (ii) can be used to systematically design dynamic security tests for broken access control. The dynamic taint analysis checks if potential broken access control risks detected during the static taint analysis really occur. We apply the approach to a part of the GitHub GraphQL API. The application illustrates that our analysis supports the detection of two types of broken access control systematically: the case where users of the API may not be able to access or manipulate information, although they should be able to do so; and the case where users (or attackers) of the API may be able to access/manipulate information that they should not.

While enabling large language models to implement function calling (known as APIs) can greatly enhance the performance of LLMs, function calling is still a challenging task due to the complicated relations between different APIs, especially in a context-learning setting without fine-tuning. This paper proposes a simple yet controllable target-driven approach called Reverse Chain to empower LLMs with capabilities to use external APIs with only prompts. Given that most open-source LLMs have limited tool-use or tool-plan capabilities, LLMs in Reverse Chain are only employed to implement simple tasks, e.g., API selection and argument completion, and a generic rule is employed to implement a controllable multiple functions calling. In this generic rule, after selecting a final API to handle a given task via LLMs, we first ask LLMs to fill the required arguments from user query and context. Some missing arguments could be further completed by letting LLMs select another API based on API description before asking user. This process continues until a given task is completed. Extensive numerical experiments indicate an impressive capability of Reverse Chain on implementing multiple function calling. Interestingly enough, the experiments also reveal that tool-use capabilities of the existing LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, can be greatly improved via Reverse Chain.

We present RepoST, a scalable method to construct environments that provide execution feedback for repository-level code generation for both training and evaluation. Unlike existing works that aim to build entire repositories for execution, which is challenging for both human and LLMs, we provide execution feedback with sandbox testing, which isolates a given target function and its dependencies to a separate script for testing. Sandbox testing reduces the complexity of external dependencies and enables constructing environments at a large scale. We use our method to construct RepoST-Train, a large-scale train set with 7,415 functions from 832 repositories. Training with the execution feedback provided by RepoST-Train leads to a performance gain of 5.5% Pass@1 on HumanEval and 3.5% Pass@1 on RepoEval. We also build an evaluation dataset, RepoST-Eval, and benchmark 12 code generation models.

Code executability plays a vital role in software debugging and testing (e.g., detecting runtime exceptions or assertion violations). However, code execution, especially partial or arbitrary code execution, is a non-trivial task due to missing definitions and complex third-party dependencies. To make partial code (such as code snippets posted on the web or code fragments deep inside complex software projects) executable, the existing study has proposed a machine learning model to predict the undefined element types and inject the pre-defined dummy values into execution. However, the performance of their tool is limited due to its simply designed dummy values and the inability to continue learning. In this paper, we design and implement a novel framework, named SelfPiCo (Self Guided Partial Code Executor), to dynamically guide partial code execution by incorporating the open-source LLM (i.e., Code Llama) within an interactive loop. Particularly, SelfPiCo leverages few-shot in-context learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to elicit human knowledge and logical reasoning based on fine-tuning the Code Llama model. SelfPiCo continuously learns from code execution results and refines its predictions step after step. Our evaluations demonstrate that SelfPiCo can execute 72.7% and 83.3% of all lines in the open-source code and Stack Overflow snippets, outperforming the most recent state-of-the-art Lexecutor by 37.9% and 33.5%, respectively. Moreover, SelfPiCo successfully detected 18 and 33 runtime type error issues by executing the partial code from eight GitHub software projects and 43 Stack Overflow posts, demonstrating the practical usage and potential application of our framework in practice.

Autonomous agent applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently risen to prominence as effective tools for addressing complex real-world tasks. At their core, agentic workflows rely on LLMs to plan and execute the use of tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in sequence to arrive at the answer to a user's request. Various benchmarks and leaderboards have emerged to evaluate an LLM's capabilities for tool and API use; however, most of these evaluations only track single or multiple isolated API calling capabilities. In this paper, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL has a total of 300 human annotated samples divided into two types - executable and non-executable. The executable samples are curated manually by crawling Rapid-APIs whereas the non-executable samples are hand picked by human annotators from data synthetically generated using an LLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs with function calling abilities on NESTFUL. Our results show that most models do not perform well on nested APIs in NESTFUL as compared to their performance on the simpler problem settings available in existing benchmarks.

The use of operating system API calls is a promising task in the detection of PE-type malware in the Windows operating system. This task is officially defined as running malware in an isolated sandbox environment, recording the API calls made with the Windows operating system and sequentially analyzing these calls. Here, we have analyzed 7107 different malicious software belonging to various families such as virus, backdoor, trojan in an isolated sandbox environment and transformed these analysis results into a format where different classification algorithms and methods can be used. First, we'll explain how we got the malware, and then we'll explain how we've got these software bundled into families. Finally, we will describe how to perform malware classification tasks using different computational methods for the researchers who will use the data set we have created.

Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple programming problems. Nevertheless, it is expensive to perform the same evaluation on complex real-world projects considering the execution cost. On the contrary, static analysis tools such as linters, which can detect errors without running the program, haven't been well explored for evaluating code generation models. In this work, we propose a static evaluation framework to quantify static errors in Python code completions, by leveraging Abstract Syntax Trees. Compared with execution-based evaluation, our method is not only more efficient, but also applicable to code in the wild. For experiments, we collect code context from open source repos to generate one million function bodies using public models. Our static analysis reveals that Undefined Name and Unused Variable are the most common errors among others made by language models. Through extensive studies, we also show the impact of sampling temperature, model size, and context on static errors in code completions.

By integrating tools from external APIs, Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded their promising capabilities in a diverse spectrum of complex real-world tasks. However, testing, evaluation, and analysis of LLM tool use remain in their early stages. Most existing benchmarks rely on manually collected test cases, many of which cannot be automatically checked for semantic correctness and instead depend on static methods such as string matching. Additionally, these benchmarks often overlook the complex interactions that occur between sequential API calls, which are common in real-world applications. To fill the gap, in this paper, we introduce StateGen, an automated framework designed to generate diverse coding tasks involving sequential API interactions. StateGen combines state-machine-based API constraint solving and validation, energy-based sampling, and control-flow injection to generate executable programs. These programs are then translated into human-like natural language task descriptions through a collaboration of two LLM agents. Utilizing StateGen, we construct StateEval, a benchmark encompassing 120 verified test cases spanning across three representative scenarios: Session Service, Tensor Operation, and ElevenLabs MCP. Experimental results confirm that StateGen can effectively generate challenging and realistic API-oriented tasks, highlighting areas for improvement in current LLMs incorporating APIs.We make our framework and benchmark publicly available to support future research.

Pretrained code language models have enabled great progress towards program synthesis. However, common approaches only consider in-file local context and thus miss information and constraints imposed by other parts of the codebase and its external dependencies. Existing code completion benchmarks also lack such context. To resolve these restrictions we curate a new dataset of permissively licensed Python packages that includes full projects and their dependencies and provide tools to extract non-local information with the help of program analyzers. We then focus on the task of function call argument completion which requires predicting the arguments to function calls. We show that existing code completion models do not yield good results on our completion task. To better solve this task, we query a program analyzer for information relevant to a given function call, and consider ways to provide the analyzer results to different code completion models during inference and training. Our experiments show that providing access to the function implementation and function usages greatly improves the argument completion performance. Our ablation study provides further insights on how different types of information available from the program analyzer and different ways of incorporating the information affect the model performance.

REST APIs play important roles in enriching the action space of web agents, yet most API-based agents rely on curated and uniform toolsets that do not reflect the complexity of real-world APIs. Building tool-using agents for arbitrary domains remains a major challenge, as it requires reading unstructured API documentation, testing APIs and inferring correct parameters. We propose Doc2Agent, a scalable pipeline to build agents that can call Python-based tools generated from API documentation. Doc2Agent generates executable tools from API documentations and iteratively refines them using a code agent. We evaluate our approach on real-world APIs, WebArena APIs, and research APIs, producing validated tools. We achieved a 55\% relative performance improvement with 90\% lower cost compared to direct API calling on WebArena benchmark. A domain-specific agent built for glycomaterial science further demonstrates the pipeline's adaptability to complex, knowledge-rich tasks. Doc2Agent offers a generalizable solution for building tool agents from unstructured API documentation at scale.

Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given English documentation and the programmatic context provided by the rest of the class. This task is challenging because the desired code can vary greatly depending on the functionality the class provides (e.g., a sort function may or may not be available when we are asked to "return the smallest element" in a particular member variable list). We introduce CONCODE, a new large dataset with over 100,000 examples consisting of Java classes from online code repositories, and develop a new encoder-decoder architecture that models the interaction between the method documentation and the class environment. We also present a detailed error analysis suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this task.

CodeLLMs have demonstrated remarkable advancements in software engineering tasks. However, while these models can generate functionally correct code, they often produce code that is inefficient in terms of runtime. This inefficiency is particularly problematic in resource-constrained environments, impacting software performance and sustainability. Existing approaches for optimizing code efficiency for CodeLLMs like SOAP and PIE exhibit certain limitations. SOAP requires a compatible execution environment and predefined test cases for iterative code modification, while PIE focuses on instruction tuning, improving efficiency but compromising correctness. These shortcomings highlight the need for a fine-tuning framework that optimizes both efficiency and correctness without relying on predefined test cases or specific execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACECode, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning framework that aligns CodeLLMs with dual objectives of efficiency and correctness. ACECode combines three key steps: (1) generating code with an actor CodeLLM, (2) calculating a training-free reward signal derived from code execution feedback for each generated code, and (3) optimizing the CodeLLM via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. This reward signal enables joint assessment of efficiency and correctness without manual labeling. We evaluate ACECode by fine-tuning four SOTA (state-of-the-art) CodeLLMs and comparing their code with three baselines: original, instruction-tuned, and PIE-tuned CodeLLMs. Extensive experiment results suggest that significantly improves the efficiency and correctness of generated code against all baselines for all CodeLLMs. Specifically, CodeLLMs fine-tuned with ACECode improve pass@1 by 1.84% to 14.51% and reduce runtime in 65% to 72% of cases compared to original CodeLLMs.

Recent availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of numerous LLM-based approaches aimed at providing natural language interfaces for various end-user tasks. These end-user tasks in turn can typically be accomplished by orchestrating a given set of APIs. In practice, natural language task requests (user queries) are often incomplete, i.e., they may not contain all the information required by the APIs. While LLMs excel at natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they frequently hallucinate on missing information or struggle with orchestrating the APIs. The key idea behind our proposed approach is to leverage logical reasoning and classical AI planning along with an LLM for accurately answering user queries including identification and gathering of any missing information in these queries. Our approach uses an LLM and ASP (Answer Set Programming) solver to translate a user query to a representation in Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) via an intermediate representation in ASP. We introduce a special API "get_info_api" for gathering missing information. We model all the APIs as PDDL actions in a way that supports dataflow between the APIs. Our approach then uses a classical AI planner to generate an orchestration of API calls (including calls to get_info_api) to answer the user query. Our evaluation results show that our approach significantly outperforms a pure LLM based approach by achieving over 95\% success rate in most cases on a dataset containing complete and incomplete single goal and multi-goal queries where the multi-goal queries may or may not require dataflow among the APIs.

We present CRUXEval (Code Reasoning, Understanding, and eXecution Evaluation), a benchmark consisting of 800 Python functions (3-13 lines). Each function comes with an input-output pair, leading to two natural tasks: input prediction and output prediction. First, we propose a generic recipe for generating our execution benchmark which can be used to create future variation of the benchmark. Second, we evaluate twenty code models on our benchmark and discover that many recent high-scoring models on HumanEval do not show the same improvements on our benchmark. Third, we show that simple CoT and fine-tuning schemes can improve performance on our benchmark but remain far from solving it. The best setup, GPT-4 with chain of thought (CoT), achieves a pass@1 of 75% and 81% on input and output prediction, respectively. In contrast, Code Llama 34B achieves a pass@1 of 50% and 46% on input and output prediction, highlighting the gap between open and closed source models. As no model is close to acing CRUXEval, we provide examples of consistent GPT-4 failures on simple programs as a lens into its code reasoning capabilities and areas for improvement.

We introduce AnyTool, a large language model agent designed to revolutionize the utilization of a vast array of tools in addressing user queries. We utilize over 16,000 APIs from Rapid API, operating under the assumption that a subset of these APIs could potentially resolve the queries. AnyTool primarily incorporates three elements: an API retriever with a hierarchical structure, a solver aimed at resolving user queries using a selected set of API candidates, and a self-reflection mechanism, which re-activates AnyTool if the initial solution proves impracticable. AnyTool is powered by the function calling feature of GPT-4, eliminating the need for training external modules. We also revisit the evaluation protocol introduced by previous works and identify a limitation in this protocol that leads to an artificially high pass rate. By revising the evaluation protocol to better reflect practical application scenarios, we introduce an additional benchmark, termed AnyToolBench. Experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our AnyTool over strong baselines such as ToolLLM and a GPT-4 variant tailored for tool utilization. For instance, AnyTool outperforms ToolLLM by +35.4% in terms of average pass rate on ToolBench. Code will be available at https://github.com/dyabel/AnyTool.

In the rapidly evolving domain of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) play a crucial role due to their advanced text processing and generation abilities. This study introduces a new strategy aimed at harnessing on-device LLMs in invoking software APIs. We meticulously compile a dataset derived from software API documentation and apply fine-tuning to LLMs with capacities of 2B, 3B and 7B parameters, specifically to enhance their proficiency in software API interactions. Our approach concentrates on refining the models' grasp of API structures and syntax, significantly enhancing the accuracy of API function calls. Additionally, we propose conditional masking techniques to ensure outputs in the desired formats and reduce error rates while maintaining inference speeds. We also propose a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in API interactions, establishing a foundation for subsequent research. Octopus, the fine-tuned model, is proved to have better performance than GPT-4 for the software APIs calling. This research aims to advance automated software development and API integration, representing substantial progress in aligning LLM capabilities with the demands of practical software engineering applications.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tackling a broad range of tasks. However, existing methods are mainly restricted to specifically designed tools and fail to fulfill complex instructions, having great limitations when confronted with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore a more realistic scenario by connecting LLMs with RESTful APIs, which adhere to the widely adopted REST software architectural style for web service development. To address the practical challenges of tackling complex instructions, we propose RestGPT, which exploits the power of LLMs and conducts a coarse-to-fine online planning mechanism to enhance the abilities of task decomposition and API selection. RestGPT also contains an API executor tailored for calling RESTful APIs, which can meticulously formulate parameters and parse API responses. To fully evaluate the performance of RestGPT, we propose RestBench, a high-quality benchmark which consists of two real-world scenarios and human-annotated instructions with gold solution paths. Experiments show that RestGPT is able to achieve impressive results in complex tasks and has strong robustness, which paves a new way towards AGI. RestGPT and RestBench is publicly available at https://restgpt.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning, which integrates LLMs with external tools to address diverse real-world challenges. Assessing the capability of LLMs to utilise tools necessitates large-scale and stable benchmarks. However, previous works relied on either hand-crafted online tools with limited scale, or large-scale real online APIs suffering from instability of API status. To address this problem, we introduce StableToolBench, a benchmark evolving from ToolBench, proposing a virtual API server and stable evaluation system. The virtual API server contains a caching system and API simulators which are complementary to alleviate the change in API status. Meanwhile, the stable evaluation system designs solvable pass and win rates using GPT-4 as the automatic evaluator to eliminate the randomness during evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the stability of StableToolBench, and further discuss the effectiveness of API simulators, the caching system, and the evaluator system.

The task of repository-level code completion is to continue writing the unfinished code based on a broader context of the repository. While for automated code completion tools, it is difficult to utilize the useful information scattered in different files. We propose RepoCoder, a simple, generic, and effective framework to address the challenge. It streamlines the repository-level code completion process by incorporating a similarity-based retriever and a pre-trained code language model in an iterative retrieval-generation pipeline. RepoCoder makes effective utilization of repository-level information for code completion and has the ability to generate code at various levels of granularity. Moreover, we propose a new benchmark RepoEval, which consists of the latest and high-quality real-world repositories covering line, API invocation, and function body completion scenarios. Experimental results indicate that RepoCoder significantly improves the In-File completion baseline by over 10% in all settings and consistently outperforms the vanilla retrieval-augmented code completion approach. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of RepoCoder through comprehensive analysis, providing valuable insights for future research. Our source code and benchmark are publicly available: https://github.com/microsoft/CodeT/tree/main/RepoCoder

Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built AppWorld Engine, a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created AppWorld Benchmark (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4o, solves only ~49% of our 'normal' tasks and ~30% of 'challenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark's difficulty and AppWorld's potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents. The project website is available at https://appworld.dev/.

Code completion has become an essential tool for daily software development. Existing evaluation benchmarks often employ static methods that do not fully capture the dynamic nature of real-world coding environments and face significant challenges, including limited context length, reliance on superficial evaluation metrics, and potential overfitting to training datasets. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for enhancing code completion in software development through the creation of a repository-level benchmark ExecRepoBench and the instruction corpora Repo-Instruct, aim at improving the functionality of open-source large language models (LLMs) in real-world coding scenarios that involve complex interdependencies across multiple files. ExecRepoBench includes 1.2K samples from active Python repositories. Plus, we present a multi-level grammar-based completion methodology conditioned on the abstract syntax tree to mask code fragments at various logical units (e.g. statements, expressions, and functions). Then, we fine-tune the open-source LLM with 7B parameters on Repo-Instruct to produce a strong code completion baseline model Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C based on the open-source model. Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C is rigorously evaluated against existing benchmarks, including MultiPL-E and ExecRepoBench, which consistently outperforms prior baselines across all programming languages. The deployment of can be used as a high-performance, local service for programming development\url{https://execrepobench.github.io/}.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has increasingly shown its power in extending large language models' (LLMs') capability beyond their pre-trained knowledge. Existing works have shown that RAG can help with software development tasks such as code generation, code update, and test generation. Yet, the effectiveness of adapting LLMs to fast-evolving or less common API libraries using RAG remains unknown. To bridge this gap, we take an initial step to study this unexplored yet practical setting - when developers code with a less common library, they often refer to its API documentation; likewise, when LLMs are allowed to look up API documentation via RAG, to what extent can LLMs be advanced? To mimic such a setting, we select four less common open-source Python libraries with a total of 1017 eligible APIs. We study the factors that affect the effectiveness of using the documentation of less common API libraries as additional knowledge for retrieval and generation. Our intensive study yields interesting findings: (1) RAG helps improve LLMs' performance by 83%-220%. (2) Example code contributes the most to advance LLMs, instead of the descriptive texts and parameter lists in the API documentation. (3) LLMs could sometimes tolerate mild noises (typos in description or incorrect parameters) by referencing their pre-trained knowledge or document context. Finally, we suggest that developers pay more attention to the quality and diversity of the code examples in the API documentation. The study sheds light on future low-code software development workflows.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their utilization in code generation tasks have significantly reshaped the field of software development. Despite the remarkable efficacy of code completion solutions in mainstream programming languages, their performance lags when applied to less ubiquitous formats such as OpenAPI definitions. This study evaluates the OpenAPI completion performance of GitHub Copilot, a prevalent commercial code completion tool, and proposes a set of task-specific optimizations leveraging Meta's open-source model Code Llama. A semantics-aware OpenAPI completion benchmark proposed in this research is used to perform a series of experiments through which the impact of various prompt-engineering and fine-tuning techniques on the Code Llama model's performance is analyzed. The fine-tuned Code Llama model reaches a peak correctness improvement of 55.2% over GitHub Copilot despite utilizing 25 times fewer parameters than the commercial solution's underlying Codex model. Additionally, this research proposes an enhancement to a widely used code infilling training technique, addressing the issue of underperformance when the model is prompted with context sizes smaller than those used during training. The dataset, the benchmark, and the model fine-tuning code are made publicly available.

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the 'Automate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.

While large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to various tasks, they still face challenges with hallucinations. Augmenting LLMs with domain-specific tools such as database utilities can facilitate easier and more precise access to specialized knowledge. In this paper, we present GeneGPT, a novel method for teaching LLMs to use the Web APIs of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) for answering genomics questions. Specifically, we prompt Codex to solve the GeneTuring tests with NCBI Web APIs by in-context learning and an augmented decoding algorithm that can detect and execute API calls. Experimental results show that GeneGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight tasks in the GeneTuring benchmark with an average score of 0.83, largely surpassing retrieval-augmented LLMs such as the new Bing (0.44), biomedical LLMs such as BioMedLM (0.08) and BioGPT (0.04), as well as GPT-3 (0.16) and ChatGPT (0.12). Our further analyses suggest that: (1) API demonstrations have good cross-task generalizability and are more useful than documentations for in-context learning; (2) GeneGPT can generalize to longer chains of API calls and answer multi-hop questions in GeneHop, a novel dataset introduced in this work; (3) Different types of errors are enriched in different tasks, providing valuable insights for future improvements.

Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations, we augment the dialogue contexts given to text2text transformers with known valid workflow names and action plans. Action plans consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account, reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan information, even when given new valid workflow names.

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

Software testing is a critical aspect of software development, yet generating test cases remains a routine task for engineers. This paper presents a benchmark, CLOVER, to evaluate models' capabilities in generating and completing test cases under specific conditions. Spanning from simple assertion completions to writing test cases that cover specific code blocks across multiple files, these tasks are based on 12 python repositories, analyzing 845 problems with context lengths ranging from 4k to 128k tokens. Utilizing code testing frameworks, we propose a method to construct retrieval contexts using coverage information. While models exhibit comparable performance with short contexts, notable differences emerge with 16k contexts. Notably, models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 can effectively leverage relevant snippets; however, all models score below 35\% on the complex Task III, even with the oracle context provided, underscoring the benchmark's significance and the potential for model improvement. The benchmark is containerized for code execution across tasks, and we will release the code, data, and construction methodologies.

Developing high-performance software is a complex task that requires specialized expertise. We introduce GSO, a benchmark for evaluating language models' capabilities in developing high-performance software. We develop an automated pipeline that generates and executes performance tests to analyze repository commit histories to identify 102 challenging optimization tasks across 10 codebases, spanning diverse domains and programming languages. An agent is provided with a codebase and performance test as a precise specification, and tasked to improve the runtime efficiency, which is measured against the expert developer optimization. Our quantitative evaluation reveals that leading SWE-Agents struggle significantly, achieving less than 5% success rate, with limited improvements even with inference-time scaling. Our qualitative analysis identifies key failure modes, including difficulties with low-level languages, practicing lazy optimization strategies, and challenges in accurately localizing bottlenecks. We release the code and artifacts of our benchmark along with agent trajectories to enable future research.

Scaling up executable code data is significant for improving language models' software engineering capability. The intricate nature of the process makes it labor-intensive, time-consuming and expert-knowledge-dependent to build a large number of executable code repositories, limiting the scalability of existing work based on running tests. The primary bottleneck lies in the automated building of test environments for different repositories, which is an essential yet underexplored task. To mitigate the gap, we introduce Repo2Run, the first LLM-based agent aiming at automating the building of executable test environments for any repositories at scale. Specifically, given a code repository, Repo2Run iteratively builds the Docker image, runs unit tests based on the feedback of the building, and synthesizes the Dockerfile until the entire pipeline is executed successfully. The resulting Dockerfile can then be used to create Docker container environments for running code and tests. We created a benchmark containing 420 Python repositories with unit tests for evaluation. The results illustrate that Repo2Run achieves an 86.0% success rate, outperforming SWE-agent by 77.0%. The resources of Repo2Run are available at https://github.com/bytedance/Repo2Run.

Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an associated tool called D2Spec for extracting specifications from web API documentation pages. Given a seed online documentation page on an API, D2Spec first crawls all documentation pages on the API, and then uses a set of machine learning techniques to extract the base URL, path templates, and HTTP methods, which collectively describe the endpoints of an API. We evaluated whether D2Spec can accurately extract endpoints from documentation on 120 web APIs. The results showed that D2Spec achieved a precision of 87.5% in identifying base URLs, a precision of 81.3% and a recall of 80.6% in generating path templates, and a precision of 84.4% and a recall of 76.2% in extracting HTTP methods. In addition, we found that D2Spec was useful when applied to APIs with pre-existing API specifications: D2Spec revealed many inconsistencies between web API documentation and their corresponding publicly available specifications. Thus, D2Spec can be used by web API providers to keep documentation and specifications in synchronization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.

Code search is an important task that has seen many developments in recent years. However, previous attempts have mostly considered the problem of searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an associated traceback) as a query and looking for answers with bugfixing instructions and code samples is a natural use case that is not covered by existing approaches. Moreover, existing datasets use comments extracted from code rather than full-text descriptions as text, making them unsuitable for this use case. We present a new SearchBySnippet dataset implementing the search-by-code use case based on StackOverflow data; it turns out that in this setting, existing architectures fall short of the simplest BM25 baseline even after fine-tuning. We present a new single encoder model SnippeR that outperforms several strong baselines on the SearchBySnippet dataset with a result of 0.451 Recall@10; we propose the SearchBySnippet dataset and SnippeR as a new important benchmark for code search evaluation.

Access to frontier large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5, is often hindered by high pricing, payment barriers, and regional restrictions. These limitations drive the proliferation of shadow APIs, third-party services that claim to provide access to official model services without regional limitations via indirect access. Despite their widespread use, it remains unclear whether shadow APIs deliver outputs consistent with those of the official APIs, raising concerns about the reliability of downstream applications and the validity of research findings that depend on them. In this paper, we present the first systematic audit between official LLM APIs and corresponding shadow APIs. We first identify 17 shadow APIs that have been utilized in 187 academic papers, with the most popular one reaching 5,966 citations and 58,639 GitHub stars by December 6, 2025. Through multidimensional auditing of three representative shadow APIs across utility, safety, and model verification, we uncover both indirect and direct evidence of deception practices in shadow APIs. Specifically, we reveal performance divergence reaching up to 47.21%, significant unpredictability in safety behaviors, and identity verification failures in 45.83% of fingerprint tests. These deceptive practices critically undermine the reproducibility and validity of scientific research, harm the interests of shadow API users, and damage the reputation of official model providers.

Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to the AI pair programmer, completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Observed heterogenous effects show promise for AI pair programmers to help people transition into software development careers.

We present MBXP, an execution-based code completion benchmark in 10+ programming languages. This collection of datasets is generated by our conversion framework that translates prompts and test cases from the original MBPP dataset to the corresponding data in a target language. Based on this benchmark, we are able to evaluate code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and in particular discover generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of large multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, benefits of few-shot prompting, and zero-shot translation abilities. In addition, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages. These solutions can be used for other code-related evaluations such as insertion-based, summarization, or code translation tasks where we demonstrate results and release as part of our benchmark.

Context: Automated code generation using Foundation Models (FMs) offers promising solutions for enhancing software development efficiency. However, challenges remain in ensuring domain specificity, cost-effectiveness, and security - especially when relying on third-party APIs. This paper introduces CodeLSI, a framework that combines low-rank optimization and domain-specific instruction tuning to address these challenges. Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate CodeLSI, a novel approach for generating high-quality code tailored to specific domains, using FMs fine-tuned on company infrastructure without dependence on external APIs. Methods: CodeLSI applies low-rank adaptation techniques to reduce the computational cost of model pre-training and fine-tuning. Domain-specific instruction tuning is employed to align code generation with organizational needs. We implemented and tested the framework on real-world JavaScript coding tasks using datasets drawn from internal software projects. Results: Experimental evaluations show that CodeLSI produces high-quality, context aware code. It outperforms baseline models in terms of relevance, accuracy, and domain fit. The use of low-rank optimization significantly reduced resource requirements, enabling scalable training on company-owned infrastructure. Conclusion: CodeLSI demonstrates that combining low-rank optimization with domain specific tuning can enhance the practicality and performance of FMs for automated code generation. This approach provides a secure, cost-efficient alternative to commercial API based solutions and supports faster, more targeted innovation in software development.

Despite the advancements of open-source large language models (LLMs) and their variants, e.g., LLaMA and Vicuna, they remain significantly limited in performing higher-level tasks, such as following human instructions to use external tools (APIs). This is because current instruction tuning largely focuses on basic language tasks instead of the tool-use domain. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, which have demonstrated excellent tool-use capabilities but are unfortunately closed source. To facilitate tool-use capabilities within open-source LLMs, we introduce ToolLLM, a general tool-use framework of data construction, model training and evaluation. We first present ToolBench, an instruction-tuning dataset for tool use, which is created automatically using ChatGPT. Specifically, we collect 16,464 real-world RESTful APIs spanning 49 categories from RapidAPI Hub, then prompt ChatGPT to generate diverse human instructions involving these APIs, covering both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Finally, we use ChatGPT to search for a valid solution path (chain of API calls) for each instruction. To make the searching process more efficient, we develop a novel depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT), enabling LLMs to evaluate multiple reasoning traces and expand the search space. We show that DFSDT significantly enhances the planning and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. For efficient tool-use assessment, we develop an automatic evaluator: ToolEval. We fine-tune LLaMA on ToolBench and obtain ToolLLaMA. Our ToolEval reveals that ToolLLaMA demonstrates a remarkable ability to execute complex instructions and generalize to unseen APIs, and exhibits comparable performance to ChatGPT. To make the pipeline more practical, we devise a neural API retriever to recommend appropriate APIs for each instruction, negating the need for manual API selection.

A fundamental skill among human developers is the ability to understand and reason about program execution. As an example, a programmer can mentally simulate code execution in natural language to debug and repair code (aka. rubber duck debugging). However, large language models (LLMs) of code are typically trained on the surface textual form of programs, thus may lack a semantic understanding of how programs execute at run-time. To address this issue, we propose NExT, a method to teach LLMs to inspect the execution traces of programs (variable states of executed lines) and reason about their run-time behavior through chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales. Specifically, NExT uses self-training to bootstrap a synthetic training set of execution-aware rationales that lead to correct task solutions (e.g., fixed programs) without laborious manual annotation. Experiments on program repair tasks based on MBPP and HumanEval demonstrate that NExT improves the fix rate of a PaLM 2 model, by 26.1% and 14.3% absolute, respectively, with significantly improved rationale quality as verified by automated metrics and human raters. Our model can also generalize to scenarios where program traces are absent at test-time.

As the capabilities of code large language models (LLMs) continue to expand, their applications across diverse code intelligence domains are rapidly increasing. However, most existing datasets only evaluate limited application domains. To address this gap, we have developed a comprehensive code evaluation dataset FullStack Bench focusing on full-stack programming, which encompasses a wide range of application domains (e.g., basic programming, data analysis, software engineering, mathematics, and machine learning). Besides, to assess multilingual programming capabilities, in FullStack Bench, we design real-world instructions and corresponding unit test cases from 16 widely-used programming languages to reflect real-world usage scenarios rather than simple translations. Moreover, we also release an effective code sandbox execution tool (i.e., SandboxFusion) supporting various programming languages and packages to evaluate the performance of our FullStack Bench efficiently. Comprehensive experimental results on our FullStack Bench demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of our FullStack Bench and SandboxFusion.

Despite the huge success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, these models struggle to understand the context present in the repository (e.g., imports, parent classes, files with similar names, etc.), thereby producing inaccurate code completions. This effect is more pronounced when using these assistants for repositories that the model has not seen during training, such as proprietary software or work-in-progress code projects. Recent work has shown the promise of using context from the repository during inference. In this work, we extend this idea and propose RepoFusion, a framework to train models to incorporate relevant repository context. Experiments on single-line code completion show that our models trained with repository context significantly outperform much larger code models as CodeGen-16B-multi (sim73times larger) and closely match the performance of the sim 70times larger StarCoderBase model that was trained with the Fill-in-the-Middle objective. We find these results to be a novel and compelling demonstration of the gains that training with repository context can bring. We carry out extensive ablation studies to investigate the impact of design choices such as context type, number of contexts, context length, and initialization within our framework. Lastly, we release Stack-Repo, a dataset of 200 Java repositories with permissive licenses and near-deduplicated files that are augmented with three types of repository contexts. Additionally, we are making available the code and trained checkpoints for our work. Our released resources can be found at https://huggingface.co/RepoFusion.

The waning of Moore's Law has shifted the focus of the tech industry towards alternative methods for continued performance gains. While optimizing compilers are a standard tool to help increase program efficiency, programmers continue to shoulder much responsibility in crafting and refactoring code with better performance characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to suggest functionally correct, performance improving code edits. We hypothesize that language models can suggest such edits in ways that would be impractical for static analysis alone. We investigate these questions by curating a large-scale dataset of Performance-Improving Edits, PIE. PIE contains trajectories of programs, where a programmer begins with an initial, slower version and iteratively makes changes to improve the program's performance. We use PIE to evaluate and improve the capacity of large language models. Specifically, use examples from PIE to fine-tune multiple variants of CODEGEN, a billion-scale Transformer-decoder model. Additionally, we use examples from PIE to prompt OpenAI's CODEX using a few-shot prompting. By leveraging PIE, we find that both CODEX and CODEGEN can generate performance-improving edits, with speedups of more than 2.5x for over 25% of the programs, for C++ and Python, even after the C++ programs were compiled using the O3 optimization level. Crucially, we show that PIE allows CODEGEN, an open-sourced and 10x smaller model than CODEX, to match the performance of CODEX on this challenging task. Overall, this work opens new doors for creating systems and methods that can help programmers write efficient code.

Existing reinforcement learning strategies based on outcome supervision have proven effective in enhancing the performance of large language models(LLMs) for code generation. While reinforcement learning based on process supervision has shown great promise in handling multi-step reasoning tasks, its effectiveness in code generation remains largely underexplored and underjustified. The primary obstacle stems from the resource-intensive nature of constructing high-quality process-supervised data, which demands substantial human expertise and computational resources. In response to this challenge, we propose a "statement mutation/refactoring-compile and execution verification" strategy: mutating and refactoring code line-by-line through a teacher model, and utilizing compiler execution results to automatically label each line, resulting in line-by-line process-supervised data, which is pivotal for training a process-supervised reward model. The trained reward model is then integrated into the PRLCoder framework, followed by experimental validation on several benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that process-supervised reinforcement learning significantly surpasses methods relying solely on outcome supervision. Notably, in tackling complex code generation tasks, process-supervised reinforcement learning shows a clear advantage, ensuring both the integrity of the code generation process and the correctness of the generation results.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents has expanded the scope of AI coding from localized code generation to complex, repository-level, and execution-driven problem solving. However, current benchmarks predominantly evaluate code logic in static contexts, neglecting the dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering, particularly in backend development which demands rigorous environment configuration and service deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ABC-Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. Using a scalable automated pipeline, we curated 224 practical tasks spanning 8 languages and 19 frameworks from open-source repositories. Distinct from previous evaluations, ABC-Bench require the agents to manage the entire development lifecycle from repository exploration to instantiating containerized services and pass the external end-to-end API tests. Our extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art models struggle to deliver reliable performance on these holistic tasks, highlighting a substantial disparity between current model capabilities and the demands of practical backend engineering. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/ABC-Bench.

Scikit-learn is an increasingly popular machine learning li- brary. Written in Python, it is designed to be simple and efficient, accessible to non-experts, and reusable in various contexts. In this paper, we present and discuss our design choices for the application programming interface (API) of the project. In particular, we describe the simple and elegant interface shared by all learning and processing units in the library and then discuss its advantages in terms of composition and reusability. The paper also comments on implementation details specific to the Python ecosystem and analyzes obstacles faced by users and developers of the library.

We introduce ISO-Bench, a benchmark for coding agents to test their capabilities on real-world inference optimization tasks. These tasks were taken from vLLM and SGLang, two of the most popular LLM serving frameworks. Each task provides an agent with a codebase and bottleneck description, whereby the agent must produce an optimization patch evaluated against expert human solutions. We curated 54 tasks from merged pull requests with measurable performance improvements. While existing benchmarks heavily use runtime-based metrics, such approaches can be gamed to pass tests without capturing the actual intent of the code changes. Therefore, we combine both hard (execution-based) and soft (LLM-based) metrics to show that both are necessary for complete evaluation. While evaluating both closed and open-source coding agents, we find no single agent dominates across codebases. Surprisingly, agents often identify correct bottlenecks but fail to execute working solutions. We also show that agents with identical underlying models differ substantially, suggesting scaffolding is as important as the model.

Applying large language models (LLMs) for academic API usage shows promise in reducing researchers' academic information seeking efforts. However, current LLM API-using methods struggle with complex API coupling commonly encountered in academic queries. To address this, we introduce SoAy, a solution-based LLM API-using methodology for academic information seeking. It uses code with a solution as the reasoning method, where a solution is a pre-constructed API calling sequence. The addition of the solution reduces the difficulty for the model to understand the complex relationships between APIs. Code improves the efficiency of reasoning. To evaluate SoAy, we introduce SoAyBench, an evaluation benchmark accompanied by SoAyEval, built upon a cloned environment of APIs from AMiner. Experimental results demonstrate a 34.58-75.99\% performance improvement compared to state-of-the-art LLM API-based baselines. All datasets, codes, tuned models, and deployed online services are publicly accessible at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SoAy.

Training large language models (LLMs) on Python execution traces grounds them in code execution and enables the line-by-line execution prediction of whole Python programs, effectively turning them into neural interpreters (FAIR CodeGen Team et al., 2025). However, developers rarely execute programs step by step; instead, they use debuggers to stop execution at certain breakpoints and step through relevant portions only while inspecting or modifying program variables. Existing neural interpreter approaches lack such interactive control. To address this limitation, we introduce neural debuggers: language models that emulate traditional debuggers, supporting operations such as stepping into, over, or out of functions, as well as setting breakpoints at specific source lines. We show that neural debuggers -- obtained via fine-tuning large LLMs or pre-training smaller models from scratch -- can reliably model both forward execution (predicting future states and outputs) and inverse execution (inferring prior states or inputs) conditioned on debugger actions. Evaluated on CruxEval, our models achieve strong performance on both output and input prediction tasks, demonstrating robust conditional execution modeling. Our work takes first steps towards future agentic coding systems in which neural debuggers serve as a world model for simulated debugging environments, providing execution feedback or enabling agents to interact with real debugging tools. This capability lays the foundation for more powerful code generation, program understanding, and automated debugging.

Code translation is a crucial activity in the software development and maintenance process, and researchers have recently begun to focus on using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for code translation. However, existing LLMs only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code, which results in unguaranteed code executability and unreliable automated code translation. To address this issue, we propose ExeCoder, an LLM specifically designed for code translation, aimed at utilizing executability representations such as functional semantics, syntax structures, and variable dependencies to enhance the capabilities of LLMs in code translation. To evaluate the effectiveness of ExeCoder, we manually enhanced the widely used benchmark TransCoder-test, resulting in a benchmark called TransCoder-test-X that serves LLMs. Evaluation of TransCoder-test-X indicates that ExeCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance in code translation, surpassing existing open-source code LLMs by over 10.88% to 38.78% and over 27.44% to 42.97% on two metrics, and even outperforms the renowned closed-source LLM GPT-4o. Website: https://execoder4trans.github.io/

Code review is one of the primary means of assuring the quality of released software along with testing and static analysis. However, code review requires experienced developers who may not always have the time to perform an in-depth review of code. Thus, automating code review can help alleviate the cognitive burden on experienced software developers allowing them to focus on their primary activities of writing code to add new features and fix bugs. In this paper, we describe our experience in using Large Language Models towards automating the code review process in Ericsson. We describe the development of a lightweight tool using LLMs and static program analysis. We then describe our preliminary experiments with experienced developers in evaluating our code review tool and the encouraging results.

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

Recent advances in LLM-based decompilers have been shown effective to convert low-level binaries into human-readable source code. However, there still lacks a comprehensive benchmark that provides large-scale binary-source function pairs, which is critical for advancing the LLM decompilation technology. Creating accurate binary-source mappings incurs severe issues caused by complex compilation settings and widespread function inlining that obscure the correspondence between binaries and their original source code. Previous efforts have either relied on used contest-style benchmarks, synthetic binary-source mappings that diverge significantly from the mappings in real world, or partially matched binaries with only code lines or variable names, compromising the effectiveness of analyzing the binary functionality. To alleviate these issues, we introduce Decompile-Bench, the first open-source dataset comprising two million binary-source function pairs condensed from 100 million collected function pairs, i.e., 450GB of binaries compiled from permissively licensed GitHub projects. For the evaluation purposes, we also developed a benchmark Decompile-Bench-Eval including manually crafted binaries from the well-established HumanEval and MBPP, alongside the compiled GitHub repositories released after 2025 to mitigate data leakage issues. We further explore commonly-used evaluation metrics to provide a thorough assessment of the studied LLM decompilers and find that fine-tuning with Decompile-Bench causes a 20% improvement over previous benchmarks in terms of the re-executability rate. Our code and data has been released in HuggingFace and Github. https://github.com/albertan017/LLM4Decompile

While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating code generation, and it can be difficult to accurately assess code generation performance rigorously. To meet this challenge, we introduce APPS, a benchmark for code generation. Unlike prior work in more restricted settings, our benchmark measures the ability of models to take an arbitrary natural language specification and generate satisfactory Python code. Similar to how companies assess candidate software developers, we then evaluate models by checking their generated code on test cases. Our benchmark includes 10,000 problems, which range from having simple one-line solutions to being substantial algorithmic challenges. We fine-tune large language models on both GitHub and our training set, and we find that the prevalence of syntax errors is decreasing exponentially as models improve. Recent models such as GPT-Neo can pass approximately 20% of the test cases of introductory problems, so we find that machine learning models are now beginning to learn how to code. As the social significance of automatic code generation increases over the coming years, our benchmark can provide an important measure for tracking advancements.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a Python interpreter, CodeAct can execute code actions and dynamically revise prior actions or emit new actions upon new observations through multi-turn interactions. Our extensive analysis of 17 LLMs on API-Bank and a newly curated benchmark shows that CodeAct outperforms widely used alternatives (up to 20% higher success rate). The encouraging performance of CodeAct motivates us to build an open-source LLM agent that interacts with environments by executing interpretable code and collaborates with users using natural language. To this end, we collect an instruction-tuning dataset CodeActInstruct that consists of 7k multi-turn interactions using CodeAct. We show that it can be used with existing data to improve models in agent-oriented tasks without compromising their general capability. CodeActAgent, finetuned from Llama2 and Mistral, is integrated with Python interpreter and uniquely tailored to perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., model training) using existing libraries and autonomously self-debug.

The automatic generation of programs has long been a fundamental challenge in computer science. Recent benchmarks have shown that large language models (LLMs) can effectively generate code at the function level, make code edits, and solve algorithmic coding tasks. However, to achieve full automation, LLMs should be able to generate production-quality, self-contained application modules. To evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in solving this challenge, we introduce BaxBench, a novel evaluation benchmark consisting of 392 tasks for the generation of backend applications. We focus on backends for three critical reasons: (i) they are practically relevant, building the core components of most modern web and cloud software, (ii) they are difficult to get right, requiring multiple functions and files to achieve the desired functionality, and (iii) they are security-critical, as they are exposed to untrusted third-parties, making secure solutions that prevent deployment-time attacks an imperative. BaxBench validates the functionality of the generated applications with comprehensive test cases, and assesses their security exposure by executing end-to-end exploits. Our experiments reveal key limitations of current LLMs in both functionality and security: (i) even the best model, OpenAI o1, achieves a mere 60% on code correctness; (ii) on average, we could successfully execute security exploits on more than half of the correct programs generated by each LLM; and (iii) in less popular backend frameworks, models further struggle to generate correct and secure applications. Progress on BaxBench signifies important steps towards autonomous and secure software development with LLMs.

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

Predicting program behavior without execution is an essential and challenging task in software engineering. Traditional models often struggle to capture dynamic dependencies and interactions within code. This paper introduces a novel machine learning-based framework called CodeFlowrepresents, which predicts code coverage and detects runtime errors through Dynamic Dependencies Learning. Utilizing control flow graphs (CFGs), CodeFlowrepresents all possible execution paths and the relationships between different statements, offering a comprehensive understanding of program behavior. It constructs CFGs to depict execution paths and learns vector representations for CFG nodes, capturing static control-flow dependencies. Additionally, it learns dynamic dependencies through execution traces, which reflect the impacts among statements during execution. This approach enables accurate prediction of code coverage and identification of runtime errors. Empirical evaluations show significant improvements in code coverage prediction accuracy and effective localization of runtime errors, surpassing current models.

Modern web dashboards and enterprise applications increasingly rely on complex, distributed microservices architectures. While these architectures offer scalability, they introduce significant challenges in debugging and observability. When failures occur, they often manifest as opaque error messages to the end-user such as Something went wrong. This masks the underlying root cause which may reside in browser side exceptions, API contract violations, or server side logic failures. Existing monitoring tools capture these events in isolation but fail to correlate them effectively or provide intelligible explanations to non technical users. This paper proposes a novel system for Automated Multi Source Debugging and Natural Language Error Explanation. The proposed framework automatically collects and correlates error data from disparate sources such as browser, API, server logs and validates API contracts in real time, and utilizes Large Language Models to generate natural language explanations. This approach significantly reduces Mean Time to Resolution for support engineers and improves the user experience by transforming cryptic error codes into actionable insights.

Code LLMs still struggle with code execution reasoning, especially in smaller models. Existing methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with teacher-generated explanations, primarily in two forms: (1) input-output (I/O) prediction chains and (2) natural-language descriptions of execution traces. However, intermediate execution steps cannot be explicitly verified during SFT, so the training objective can reduce to merely matching teacher explanations. Moreover, training data is typically collected without explicit control over task difficulty. We introduce ExecVerify, which goes beyond text imitation by incorporating verifiable white-box rewards derived from execution traces, including next-statement prediction and variable value/type prediction. Our work first builds a dataset with multiple difficulty levels via constraint-based program synthesis. Then, we apply reinforcement learning (RL) to reward correct answers about both intermediate execution steps and final outputs, aligning the training objective with semantic correctness at each execution step. Finally, we adopt a two-stage training pipeline that first enhances execution reasoning and then transfers to code generation. Experiments demonstrate that a 7B model trained with ExecVerify achieves performance comparable to 32B models on code reasoning benchmarks and improves pass@1 by up to 5.9\% on code generation tasks over strong post-training baselines.

Code generation has largely improved development efficiency in the era of large language models (LLMs). With the ability to follow instructions, current LLMs can be prompted to generate code solutions given detailed descriptions in natural language. Many research efforts are being devoted to improving the correctness of LLM-generated code, and many benchmarks are proposed to evaluate the correctness comprehensively. Despite the focus on correctness, the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions is under-explored. Current correctness benchmarks are not suitable for time efficiency evaluation since their test cases cannot well distinguish the time efficiency of different code solutions. Besides, the current execution time measurement is not stable and comprehensive, threatening the validity of the time efficiency evaluation. To address the challenges in the time efficiency evaluation of code generation, we propose COFFE, a code generation benchmark for evaluating the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions. COFFE contains 398 and 358 problems for function-level and file-level code generation, respectively. To improve the distinguishability, we design a novel stressful test case generation approach with contracts and two new formats of test cases to improve the accuracy of generation. For the time evaluation metric, we propose efficienct@k based on CPU instruction count to ensure a stable and solid comparison between different solutions. We evaluate 14 popular LLMs on COFFE and identify four findings. Based on the findings, we draw some implications for LLM researchers and software practitioners to facilitate future research and usage of LLMs in code generation.

Most existing pre-trained language models for source code focus on learning the static code text, typically augmented with static code structures (abstract syntax tree, dependency graphs, etc.). However, program semantics will not be fully exposed before the real execution. Without an understanding of the program execution, statically pre-trained models fail to comprehensively capture the dynamic code properties, such as the branch coverage and the runtime variable values, and they are consequently less effective at code understanding tasks, such as retrieving semantic clones and detecting software vulnerabilities. To close the gap between the static nature of language models and the dynamic characteristics of programs, we introduce TRACED, an execution-aware pre-training strategy for source code. Specifically, we pre-train code language models with a combination of source code, executable inputs, and corresponding execution traces. Our goal is to teach code models the complicated execution logic during the pre-training, enabling the model to statically estimate the dynamic code properties without repeatedly executing code during task-specific fine-tuning. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we fine-tune and evaluate TRACED on three downstream tasks: static execution estimation, clone retrieval, and vulnerability detection. The empirical results show that TRACED relatively improves the statically pre-trained code models by 12.4% for complete execution path prediction and by 25.2% for runtime variable value predictions. TRACED also significantly outperforms statically pre-trained models in clone retrieval and vulnerability detection across four public benchmarks.

LLMs show promise in transforming software development, with a growing interest in integrating them into more intelligent apps. Frameworks like LangChain aid LLM-integrated app development, offering code execution utility/APIs for custom actions. However, these capabilities theoretically introduce Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, enabling remote code execution through prompt injections. No prior research systematically investigates these frameworks' RCE vulnerabilities or their impact on applications and exploitation consequences. Therefore, there is a huge research gap in this field. In this study, we propose LLMSmith to detect, validate and exploit the RCE vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated frameworks and apps. To achieve this goal, we develop two novel techniques, including 1) a lightweight static analysis to examine LLM integration mechanisms, and construct call chains to identify RCE vulnerabilities in frameworks; 2) a systematical prompt-based exploitation method to verify and exploit the found vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated apps. This technique involves various strategies to control LLM outputs, trigger RCE vulnerabilities and launch subsequent attacks. Our research has uncovered a total of 20 vulnerabilities in 11 LLM-integrated frameworks, comprising 19 RCE vulnerabilities and 1 arbitrary file read/write vulnerability. Of these, 17 have been confirmed by the framework developers, with 11 vulnerabilities being assigned CVE IDs. For the 51 apps potentially affected by RCE, we successfully executed attacks on 17 apps, 16 of which are vulnerable to RCE and 1 to SQL injection. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of these vulnerabilities and construct practical attacks to demonstrate the hazards in reality. Last, we propose several mitigation measures for both framework and app developers to counteract such attacks.

Publicly available source-code libraries are continuously growing and changing. This makes it impossible for models of code to keep current with all available APIs by simply training these models on existing code repositories. Thus, existing models inherently cannot generalize to using unseen functions and libraries, because these would never appear in the training data. In contrast, when human programmers use functions and libraries for the first time, they frequently refer to textual resources such as code manuals and documentation, to explore and understand the available functionality. Inspired by this observation, we introduce DocPrompting: a natural-language-to-code generation approach that explicitly leverages documentation by (1) retrieving the relevant documentation pieces given an NL intent, and (2) generating code based on the NL intent and the retrieved documentation. DocPrompting is general: it can be applied to any programming language and is agnostic to the underlying neural model. We demonstrate that DocPrompting consistently improves NL-to-code models: DocPrompting improves strong base models such as CodeT5 by 2.85% in pass@1 (52% relative gain) and 4.39% in pass@10 (30% relative gain) in execution-based evaluation on the popular Python CoNaLa benchmark; on a new Bash dataset tldr, DocPrompting improves CodeT5 and GPT-Neo1.3B by up to absolute 6.9% exact match.

The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset is available on Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/xlam-function-calling-60k and the project homepage: https://apigen-pipeline.github.io/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on coding related tasks, particularly on assisting humans in programming and facilitating programming automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of LLMs suffer from severe limitations. First, most benchmarks are deficient as they focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks, whereas the real-world software development scenarios show dire need to implement systems with multilingual programming environments to satisfy diverse requirements. Practical programming practices also strongly expect multi-task settings for testing coding capabilities of LLMs comprehensively and robustly. Second, most benchmarks also fail to consider the actual executability and the consistency of execution results of the generated code. To bridge these gaps between existing benchmarks and expectations from practical applications, we introduce CodeScope, an execution-based, multilingual, multi-task, multi-dimensional evaluation benchmark for comprehensively gauging LLM capabilities on coding tasks. CodeScope covers 43 programming languages and 8 coding tasks. It evaluates the coding performance of LLMs from three dimensions (perspectives): difficulty, efficiency, and length. To facilitate execution-based evaluations of code generation, we develop MultiCodeEngine, an automated code execution engine that supports 14 programming languages. Finally, we systematically evaluate and analyze 8 mainstream LLMs on CodeScope tasks and demonstrate the superior breadth and challenges of CodeScope for evaluating LLMs on code understanding and generation tasks compared to other benchmarks. The CodeScope benchmark and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeScope.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, StarCoder, and CodeLlama, are transforming the way developers approach programming by automatically generating code based on given natural language descriptions. Despite advancements, generating syntactically and semantically correct code remains challenging, especially for complex programming tasks. Existing approaches typically generate multiple candidate solutions using LLMs to increase the likelihood of producing correct code. However, selecting the correct code from these candidates-a process known as code ranking-remains a major challenge. Current research on code ranking can be categorized into execution-based and non-execution-based methods. Execution-based methods, although effective, encounter notable limitations, such as scarcity of quality unit tests and security risks. Non-execution-based methods like CodeRanker, which rely solely on classification labels to train a code ranker, struggle to capture subtle errors and provide detailed error insights. Recognizing the strengths and limitations of both approaches, we propose a new method. The key insight of our work is that an effective code ranker is expected to truly comprehend the underlying causes of erroneous code, as relying solely on classification labels is insufficient. Inspired by this, this paper puts forward RankEF, an innovative approach for code ranking that leverages execution feedback. RankEF employs multi-task learning to integrate code classification with execution feedback generation. This approach enables the model to understand the reasons behind incorrect code, distinguishing between correct and incorrect solutions without the need to execute the code during the ranking phase. Experiments on three code generation benchmarks demonstrate that RankEF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CodeRanker.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in code generation, but their generated code often suffers from inefficiency, resulting in longer execution times and higher memory consumption. To address this issue, we propose EffiLearner, a self-optimization framework that utilizes execution overhead profiles to improve the efficiency of LLM-generated code. EffiLearner first generates code using an LLM, then executes it locally to capture execution time and memory usage profiles. These profiles are fed back to the LLM, which then revises the code to reduce overhead. To evaluate the effectiveness of EffiLearner, we conduct extensive experiments on the EffiBench, HumanEval, and MBPP with 16 open-source and 6 closed-source models. Our evaluation results demonstrate that through iterative self-optimization, EffiLearner significantly enhances the efficiency of LLM-generated code. For example, the execution time (ET) of StarCoder2-15B for the EffiBench decreases from 0.93 (s) to 0.12 (s) which reduces 87.1% the execution time requirement compared with the initial code. The total memory usage (TMU) of StarCoder2-15B also decreases from 22.02 (Mb*s) to 2.03 (Mb*s), which decreases 90.8% of total memory consumption during the execution process. The source code of EffiLearner was released in https://github.com/huangd1999/EffiLearner

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in downstream software engineering tasks such as Automated Program Repair (APR). In particular, there has been a lot of research on repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-Bench. Although there has been significant progress on this topic, we notice that in the process of solving such issues, existing agentic systems tend to hyper-localize on immediately suspicious lines of code and fix them in isolation, without a deeper understanding of the issue semantics, code semantics, or execution semantics. Consequently, many existing systems generate patches that overfit to the user issue, even when a more general fix is preferable. To address this limitation, we introduce SemAgent, a novel workflow-based procedure that leverages issue, code, and execution semantics to generate patches that are complete - identifying and fixing all lines relevant to the issue. We achieve this through a novel pipeline that (a) leverages execution semantics to retrieve relevant context, (b) comprehends issue-semantics via generalized abstraction, (c) isolates code-semantics within the context of this abstraction, and (d) leverages this understanding in a two-stage architecture: a repair stage that proposes fine-grained fixes, followed by a reviewer stage that filters relevant fixes based on the inferred issue-semantics. Our evaluations show that our methodology achieves a solve rate of 44.66% on the SWEBench-Lite benchmark beating all other workflow-based approaches, and an absolute improvement of 7.66% compared to our baseline, which lacks such deep semantic understanding. We note that our approach performs particularly well on issues requiring multi-line reasoning (and editing) and edge-case handling, suggesting that incorporating issue and code semantics into APR pipelines can lead to robust and semantically consistent repairs.

Context: The software maintenance phase involves many activities such as code refactoring, bug fixing, code review or testing. Program comprehension is key to all these activities, as it demands developers to grasp the knowledge (e.g., implementation details) required to modify the codebase. Methods as main building blocks in a program can offer developers this knowledge source for code comprehension. However, reading entire method statements can be challenging, which necessitates precise and up-to-date comments. Objective: We propose a solution as an IntelliJ IDEA plugin, named SmartDoc, that assists developers in generating context-aware method comments. Method: This plugin acts as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that has its own memory and is augmented by target methods' context. When a request is initiated by the end-user, the method content and all its nested method calls are used in the comment generation. At the beginning, these nested methods are visited and a call graph is generated. This graph is then traversed using depth-first search (DFS), enabling the provision of full-context to enrich Large Language Model (LLM) prompts. Result: The product is a software, as a plugin, developed for Java codebase and installable on IntelliJ IDEA. This plugin can serve concurrently for methods whose comments are being updated , and it shares memory across all flows to avoid redundant calls. o measure the accuracy of this solution, a dedicated test case is run to record SmartDoc generated comments and their corresponding ground truth. For each collected result-set, three metrics are computed, BERTScore, BLEU and ROUGE-1. These metrics will determine how accurate the generated comments are in comparison to the ground truth. Result: The obtained accuracy, in terms of the precision, recall and F1, is promising, and lies in the range of 0.80 to 0.90 for BERTScore.

Background: Some developer activity traditionally performed manually, such as making code commits, opening, managing, or closing issues is increasingly subject to automation in many OSS projects. Specifically, such activity is often performed by tools that react to events or run at specific times. We refer to such automation tools as bots and, in many software mining scenarios related to developer productivity or code quality it is desirable to identify bots in order to separate their actions from actions of individuals. Aim: Find an automated way of identifying bots and code committed by these bots, and to characterize the types of bots based on their activity patterns. Method and Result: We propose BIMAN, a systematic approach to detect bots using author names, commit messages, files modified by the commit, and projects associated with the ommits. For our test data, the value for AUC-ROC was 0.9. We also characterized these bots based on the time patterns of their code commits and the types of files modified, and found that they primarily work with documentation files and web pages, and these files are most prevalent in HTML and JavaScript ecosystems. We have compiled a shareable dataset containing detailed information about 461 bots we found (all of whom have more than 1000 commits) and 13,762,430 commits they created.

Code optimization is a daunting task that requires a significant level of expertise from experienced programmers. This level of expertise is not sufficient when compared to the rapid development of new hardware architectures. Towards advancing the whole code optimization process, recent approaches rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper introduces a new framework to decrease the complexity of code optimization. The proposed framework builds on large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) and enables LLMs to receive feedback from their environment (i.e., unit tests) during the fine-tuning process. We compare our framework with existing state-of-the-art models and show that it is more efficient with respect to speed and computational usage, as a result of the decrement in training steps and its applicability to models with fewer parameters. Additionally, our framework reduces the possibility of logical and syntactical errors. Toward evaluating our approach, we run several experiments on the PIE dataset using a CodeT5 language model and RRHF, a new reinforcement learning algorithm. We adopt a variety of evaluation metrics with regards to optimization quality, and speedup. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework has similar results in comparison with existing models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models. In particular, we accomplish an increase of 5.6% and 2.2 over the baseline models concerning the %OP T and SP metrics.