An LLM-as-Judge Metric for Bridging the Gap with Human Evaluation in SE Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) and other automated techniques have been increasingly used to support software developers by generating software artifacts such as code snippets, patches, and comments. However, accurately assessing the correctness of these generated artifacts remains a significant challenge. On one hand, human evaluation provides high accuracy but is labor-intensive and lacks scalability. On the other hand, other existing automatic evaluation metrics are scalable and require minimal human effort, but they often fail to accurately reflect the actual correctness of generated software artifacts. In this paper, we present SWE-Judge, the first evaluation metric for LLM-as-Ensemble-Judge specifically designed to accurately assess the correctness of generated software artifacts. SWE-Judge first defines five distinct evaluation strategies, each implemented as an independent judge. A dynamic team selection mechanism then identifies the most appropriate subset of judges to produce a final correctness score through ensembling. We evaluate SWE-Judge across a diverse set of software engineering (SE) benchmarks, including CoNaLa, Card2Code, HumanEval-X, APPS, APR-Assess, and Summary-Assess. These benchmarks span three SE tasks: code generation, automated program repair, and code summarization. Experimental results demonstrate that SWE-Judge consistently achieves a higher correlation with human judgments, with improvements ranging from 5.9% to 183.8% over existing automatic metrics. Furthermore, SWE-Judge reaches agreement levels with human annotators that are comparable to inter-annotator agreement in code generation and program repair tasks. These findings underscore SWE-Judge's potential as a scalable and reliable alternative to human evaluation.

CODE-DITING: A Reasoning-Based Metric for Functional Alignment in Code Evaluation

Trustworthy evaluation methods for code snippets play a crucial role in neural code generation. Traditional methods, which either rely on reference solutions or require executable test cases, have inherent limitation in flexibility and scalability. The recent LLM-as-Judge methodology offers a promising alternative by directly evaluating functional consistency between the problem description and the generated code. To systematically understand the landscape of these LLM-as-Judge methods, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across three diverse datasets. Our investigation reveals the pros and cons of two categories of LLM-as-Judge methods: the methods based on general foundation models can achieve good performance but require complex prompts and lack explainability, while the methods based on reasoning foundation models provide better explainability with simpler prompts but demand substantial computational resources due to their large parameter sizes. To address these limitations, we propose CODE-DITING, a novel code evaluation method that balances accuracy, efficiency and explainability. We develop a data distillation framework that effectively transfers reasoning capabilities from DeepSeek-R1671B to our CODE-DITING 1.5B and 7B models, significantly enhancing evaluation explainability and reducing the computational cost. With the majority vote strategy in the inference process, CODE-DITING 1.5B outperforms all models with the same magnitude of parameters and achieves performance which would normally exhibit in a model with 5 times of parameter scale. CODE-DITING 7B surpasses GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 671B, even though it only uses 1% of the parameter volume of these large models. Further experiments show that CODEDITING is robust to preference leakage and can serve as a promising alternative for code evaluation.

Let the Trial Begin: A Mock-Court Approach to Vulnerability Detection using LLM-Based Agents

Detecting vulnerabilities in source code remains a critical yet challenging task, especially when benign and vulnerable functions share significant similarities. In this work, we introduce VulTrial, a courtroom-inspired multi-agent framework designed to enhance automated vulnerability detection. It employs four role-specific agents, which are security researcher, code author, moderator, and review board. Through extensive experiments using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o we demonstrate that Vultrial outperforms single-agent and multi-agent baselines. Using GPT-4o, VulTrial improves the performance by 102.39% and 84.17% over its respective baseline. Additionally, we show that role-specific instruction tuning in multi-agent with small data (50 pair samples) improves the performance of VulTrial further by 139.89% and 118.30%. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of increasing the number of agent interactions on VulTrial's overall performance. While multi-agent setups inherently incur higher costs due to increased token usage, our findings reveal that applying VulTrial to a cost-effective model like GPT-3.5 can improve its performance by 69.89% compared to GPT-4o in a single-agent setting, at a lower overall cost.

Toward Generalizable Evaluation in the LLM Era: A Survey Beyond Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing at an amazing speed and have become indispensable across academia, industry, and daily applications. To keep pace with the status quo, this survey probes the core challenges that the rise of LLMs poses for evaluation. We identify and analyze two pivotal transitions: (i) from task-specific to capability-based evaluation, which reorganizes benchmarks around core competencies such as knowledge, reasoning, instruction following, multi-modal understanding, and safety; and (ii) from manual to automated evaluation, encompassing dynamic dataset curation and "LLM-as-a-judge" scoring. Yet, even with these transitions, a crucial obstacle persists: the evaluation generalization issue. Bounded test sets cannot scale alongside models whose abilities grow seemingly without limit. We will dissect this issue, along with the core challenges of the above two transitions, from the perspectives of methods, datasets, evaluators, and metrics. Due to the fast evolving of this field, we will maintain a living GitHub repository (links are in each section) to crowd-source updates and corrections, and warmly invite contributors and collaborators.

Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Code Search without Fine-Tuning

Code search aims to retrieve semantically relevant code snippets for natural language queries. While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance in this task, they struggle in cross-domain scenarios, often requiring costly fine-tuning or facing performance drops in zero-shot settings. RAPID, which generates synthetic data for model fine-tuning, is currently the only effective method for zero-shot cross-domain code search. Despite its effectiveness, RAPID demands substantial computational resources for fine-tuning and needs to maintain specialized models for each domain, underscoring the need for a zero-shot, fine-tuning-free approach for cross-domain code search. The key to tackling zero-shot cross-domain code search lies in bridging the gaps among domains. In this work, we propose to break the query-code matching process of code search into two simpler tasks: query-comment matching and code-code matching. Our empirical study reveals the strong complementarity among the three matching schemas in zero-shot cross-domain settings, i.e., query-code, query-comment, and code-code matching. Based on the findings, we propose CodeBridge, a zero-shot, fine-tuning-free approach for cross-domain code search. Specifically, CodeBridge uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate comments and pseudo-code, then combines query-code, query-comment, and code-code matching via PLM-based similarity scoring and sampling-based fusion. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art PLM-based code search approaches, i.e., CoCoSoDa and UniXcoder, by an average of 21.4% and 24.9% in MRR, respectively, across three datasets. Our approach also yields results that are better than or comparable to those of the zero-shot cross-domain code search approach RAPID, which requires costly fine-tuning.

R2Vul: Learning to Reason about Software Vulnerabilities with Reinforcement Learning and Structured Reasoning Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in software vulnerability detection (SVD), yet their reasoning capabilities remain unreliable. Existing approaches relying on chain-of-thought (CoT) struggle to provide relevant and actionable security assessments. Additionally, effective SVD requires not only generating coherent reasoning but also differentiating between well-founded and misleading yet plausible security assessments, an aspect overlooked in prior work. To this end, we introduce R2Vul, a novel approach that distills structured reasoning into small LLMs using reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF). Through RLAIF, R2Vul enables LLMs to produce structured, security-aware reasoning that is actionable and reliable while explicitly learning to distinguish valid assessments from misleading ones. We evaluate R2Vul across five languages against SAST tools, CoT, instruction tuning, and classification-based baselines. Our results show that R2Vul with structured reasoning distillation enables a 1.5B student LLM to rival larger models while improving generalization to out-of-distribution vulnerabilities. Beyond model improvements, we contribute a large-scale, multilingual preference dataset featuring structured reasoning to support future research in SVD.

Towards Secure Program Partitioning for Smart Contracts with LLM's In-Context Learning

Smart contracts are highly susceptible to manipulation attacks due to the leakage of sensitive information. Addressing manipulation vulnerabilities is particularly challenging because they stem from inherent data confidentiality issues rather than straightforward implementation bugs. To tackle this by preventing sensitive information leakage, we present PartitionGPT, the first LLM-driven approach that combines static analysis with the in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to partition smart contracts into privileged and normal codebases, guided by a few annotated sensitive data variables. We evaluated PartitionGPT on 18 annotated smart contracts containing 99 sensitive functions. The results demonstrate that PartitionGPT successfully generates compilable, and verified partitions for 78% of the sensitive functions while reducing approximately 30% code compared to function-level partitioning approach. Furthermore, we evaluated PartitionGPT on nine real-world manipulation attacks that lead to a total loss of 25 million dollars, PartitionGPT effectively prevents eight cases, highlighting its potential for broad applicability and the necessity for secure program partitioning during smart contract development to diminish manipulation vulnerabilities.

Less is More: On the Importance of Data Quality for Unit Test Generation

Unit testing is crucial for software development and maintenance. Effective unit testing ensures and improves software quality, but writing unit tests is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recent studies have proposed deep learning (DL) techniques or large language models (LLMs) to automate unit test generation. These models are usually trained or fine-tuned on large-scale datasets. Despite growing awareness of the importance of data quality, there has been limited research on the quality of datasets used for test generation. To bridge this gap, we systematically examine the impact of noise on the performance of learning-based test generation models. We first apply the open card sorting method to analyze the most popular and largest test generation dataset, Methods2Test, to categorize eight distinct types of noise. Further, we conduct detailed interviews with 17 domain experts to validate and assess the importance, reasonableness, and correctness of the noise taxonomy. Then, we propose CleanTest, an automated noise-cleaning framework designed to improve the quality of test generation datasets. CleanTest comprises three filters: a rule-based syntax filter, a rule-based relevance filter, and a model-based coverage filter. To evaluate its effectiveness, we apply CleanTest on two widely-used test generation datasets, i.e., Methods2Test and Atlas. Our findings indicate that 43.52% and 29.65% of datasets contain noise, highlighting its prevalence. Finally, we conduct comparative experiments using four LLMs (i.e., CodeBERT, AthenaTest, StarCoder, and CodeLlama7B) to assess the impact of noise on test generation performance. The results show that filtering noise positively influences the test generation ability of the models.

LessLeak-Bench: A First Investigation of Data Leakage in LLMs Across 83 Software Engineering Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely utilized in software engineering (SE) tasks, such as code generation and automated program repair. However, their reliance on extensive and often undisclosed pre-training datasets raises significant concerns about data leakage, where the evaluation benchmark data is unintentionally ``seen'' by LLMs during the model's construction phase. The data leakage issue could largely undermine the validity of LLM-based research and evaluations. Despite the increasing use of LLMs in the SE community, there is no comprehensive study that assesses the extent of data leakage in SE benchmarks for LLMs yet. To address this gap, this paper presents the first large-scale analysis of data leakage in 83 SE benchmarks concerning LLMs. Our results show that in general, data leakage in SE benchmarks is minimal, with average leakage ratios of only 4.8\%, 2.8\%, and 0.7\% for Python, Java, and C/C++ benchmarks, respectively. However, some benchmarks exhibit relatively higher leakage ratios, which raises concerns about their bias in evaluation. For instance, QuixBugs and BigCloneBench have leakage ratios of 100.0\% and 55.7\%, respectively. Furthermore, we observe that data leakage has a substantial impact on LLM evaluation. We also identify key causes of high data leakage, such as the direct inclusion of benchmark data in pre-training datasets and the use of coding platforms like LeetCode for benchmark construction. To address the data leakage, we introduce \textbf{LessLeak-Bench}, a new benchmark that removes leaked samples from the 83 SE benchmarks, enabling more reliable LLM evaluations in future research. Our study enhances the understanding of data leakage in SE benchmarks and provides valuable insights for future research involving LLMs in SE.

Do Existing Testing Tools Really Uncover Gender Bias in Text-to-Image Models?

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently gained significant attention due to their ability to generate high-quality images and are consequently used in a wide range of applications. However, there are concerns about the gender bias of these models. Previous studies have shown that T2I models can perpetuate or even amplify gender stereotypes when provided with neutral text prompts. Researchers have proposed automated gender bias uncovering detectors for T2I models, but a crucial gap exists: no existing work comprehensively compares the various detectors and understands how the gender bias detected by them deviates from the actual situation. This study addresses this gap by validating previous gender bias detectors using a manually labeled dataset and comparing how the bias identified by various detectors deviates from the actual bias in T2I models, as verified by manual confirmation. We create a dataset consisting of 6,000 images generated from three cutting-edge T2I models: Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion 3, and Dreamlike Photoreal 2.0. During the human-labeling process, we find that all three T2I models generate a portion (12.48% on average) of low-quality images (e.g., generate images with no face present), where human annotators cannot determine the gender of the person. Our analysis reveals that all three T2I models show a preference for generating male images, with SDXL being the most biased. Additionally, images generated using prompts containing professional descriptions (e.g., lawyer or doctor) show the most bias. We evaluate seven gender bias detectors and find that none fully capture the actual level of bias in T2I models, with some detectors overestimating bias by up to 26.95%. We further investigate the causes of inaccurate estimations, highlighting the limitations of detectors in dealing with low-quality images. Based on our findings, we propose an enhanced detector...