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SWE-Search: Enhancing Software Agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Iterative Refinement

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arxiv 2410.20285 v6 pith:MLLLAUXZ submitted 2024-10-26 cs.AI

classification cs.AI
keywords softwareagentssearchmctsperformanceswe-searchvalueagent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Software engineers operating in complex and dynamic environments must continuously adapt to evolving requirements, learn iteratively from experience, and reconsider their approaches based on new insights. However, current large language model (LLM)-based software agents often follow linear, sequential processes that prevent backtracking and exploration of alternative solutions, limiting their ability to rethink their strategies when initial approaches prove ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-Search, a multi-agent framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a self-improvement mechanism to enhance software agents' performance on repository-level software tasks. SWE-Search extends traditional MCTS by incorporating a hybrid value function that leverages LLMs for both numerical value estimation and qualitative evaluation. This enables self-feedback loops where agents iteratively refine their strategies based on both quantitative numerical evaluations and qualitative natural language assessments of pursued trajectories. The framework includes a SWE-Agent for adaptive exploration, a Value Agent for iterative feedback, and a Discriminator Agent that facilitates multi-agent debate for collaborative decision-making. Applied to the SWE-bench benchmark, our approach demonstrates a 23% relative improvement in performance across five models compared to standard open-source agents without MCTS. Our analysis reveals how performance scales with increased inference-time compute through deeper search, providing a pathway to improve software agents without requiring larger models or additional training data. This highlights the potential of self-evaluation driven search techniques in complex software engineering environments.

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Forward citations

Cited by 17 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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  3. When Does Restricting a Coding Agent to execute_code Help? A Regime $\times$ Agent-Design Ablation

    cs.SE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    Code-only tool surfaces beat or match the cheapest tool-rich rival on cost in three of four (regime, agent) cells at matched pass rates; Claude on SWE-bench is the directional exception via failure cost.

  4. Autonomous Repair for Multi-Agent Systems via Monte-Carlo Tree Search

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An MCTS-based repair loop with partial rollouts and an LLM-as-a-judge reward raises post-repair pass rates by 3–12% over DoVer, ReAct, and Reflexion baselines, backed by a new replayable benchmark StateMAS.

  5. PhoenixRepair: Rethinking Repair Strategy Exploration in Software Agents

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A multi-agent repair framework that samples multiple edit locations and iteratively reflects on patch attempts reaches 76.0% Pass@1 on SWE-bench-Verified, up to a 7.8% relative gain over SWE-agent.

  6. IssueExec: A Test-Driven Approach for Localizing Software Engineering Issues

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    IssueExec localizes issue-relevant code by retrieving related tests and following their execution traces, beating prior localization methods on SWE-bench Lite.

  7. SGAgent: Suggestion-Guided LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Repository-Level Software Repair

    cs.SE 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A three-agent locate-suggest-fix framework with a knowledge-graph toolkit resolves 154/300 SWE-Bench-Lite issues with Claude-3.5, outperforming same-model baselines by 5-10 points.

  8. ToolSelf: Unifying Task Execution and Self-Reconfiguration via Tool-Driven Emergent Adaptation

    cs.AI 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An LLM agent that can call a reconfiguration tool to update its sub-goals, toolbox, strategy, and context outperforms static-config agents across FRAMES, xbench, GAIA, and SWE-bench Lite.

  9. SVRepair: Structured Visual Reasoning for Automated Program Repair

    cs.SE 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A multimodal program-repair system that converts bug screenshots into semantic scene graphs and iteratively crops to bug regions, reporting 36.47% on SWE-Bench M, 38.02% on MMCode, and 95.12% on CodeVision.

  10. From Historical Patches to Repair Plans: Outcome-Conditioned Reasoning for Repository-Level Program Repair

    cs.SE 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Backward reasoning distilled from a repository's already-fixed issues, injected as prompts, lifts LLM repair success on SWE-Bench Lite by up to 10.4 Pass@1 points.

  11. SWE-Debate: Competitive Multi-Agent Debate for Software Issue Resolution

    cs.SE 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A competitive multi-agent debate over graph-derived fault propagation chains lifts automated issue resolution on SWE-bench Verified to 41.4% pass@1.

  12. SWE-Perf: Can Language Models Optimize Code Performance on Real-World Repositories?

    cs.SE 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A repository-level benchmark shows LLMs and agents currently achieve far smaller, statistically verified speedups than expert human patches on 140 real-world Python performance tasks.

  13. Seeing is Fixing: Cross-Modal Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs for Visual Software Issue Fixing

    cs.SE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    GUIRepair, a cross-modal LLM pipeline that converts issue screenshots into reproduction code and rendered patch screenshots into validation feedback, resolves 157/517 SWE-bench M instances with GPT-4o and 175 with o4-mini.

  14. Code Graph Model (CGM): A Graph-Integrated Large Language Model for Repository-Level Software Engineering Tasks

    cs.SE 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A graph-integrated open-source LLM with agentless RAG resolves 43% of SWE-bench Lite issues, best among open-weight models.

  15. Is Inter-Seed Cross-Play Enough? Evaluating the Robustness of Zero-Shot Coordination Algorithms to Implementation Details

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    For Other-Play in Yokai, agents trained with different implementation details coordinate across implementations about as well as across seeds, supporting inter-seed cross-play as a proxy for cross-implementation evaluation.

  16. Detection Time Distribution Predicted Using Absorbing Boundary Conditions and Imaginary Potentials

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  17. Evolutionary Perspectives on the Evaluation of LLM-Based AI Agents: A Comprehensive Survey

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    A survey that classifies AI agent evaluation benchmarks along environment and capability axes, and proposes five traits that distinguish agents from chatbots.

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