Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills

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Summary

Socratic-SWE introduces a closed-loop self-evolution framework for software engineering agents that leverages historical solving traces to generate targeted repair tasks, achieving 50.40% on SWE-bench Verified after three iterations.

LLM-driven software engineering agents have become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks. Existing synthetic data methods typically create tasks through fixed mutation or bug-injection procedures, making the resulting distributions largely independent of the agent's own weaknesses and training progress. We introduce Socratic-SWE, a closed-loop self-evolution framework that reuses the agent's historical solving traces as a source of training signal. Rather than treating traces only as evidence for reward computation, Socratic-SWE distills them into structured agent skills that summarize recurring failures and effective repair patterns. These skills then guide the generation of targeted repair tasks in real repositories. Candidate tasks are checked through execution-based validation and scored with a solver-gradient alignment reward, so that the retained tasks are both verifiable and useful for improving the Solver. The updated Solver produces new traces, enabling the task curriculum to adapt over successive rounds. Across SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Lite, SWE-bench Pro, and Terminal-Bench 2.0, Socratic-SWE consistently improves over self-evolving baselines under the same compute budget, reaching 50.40% on SWE-bench Verified after three iterations. These results suggest that solving traces can serve as a scalable substrate for self-evolving SWE agents.
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Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.07412

Abstract

Socratic-SWE enables self-evolving software engineering agents by leveraging historical solving traces to generate targeted repair tasks that improve agent performance through iterative refinement.

LLM-driven software engineering agentshave become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks. Existingsynthetic data methodstypically create tasks throughfixed mutationorbug-injection procedures, making the resulting distributions largely independent of the agent’s own weaknesses and training progress. We introduce Socratic-SWE, aclosed-loop self-evolution frameworkthat reuses the agent’shistorical solving tracesas a source of training signal. Rather than treating traces only as evidence for reward computation, Socratic-SWE distills them intostructured agent skillsthat summarize recurring failures and effectiverepair patterns. These skills then guide the generation of targeted repair tasks in real repositories. Candidate tasks are checked throughexecution-based validationand scored with asolver-gradient alignment reward, so that the retained tasks are both verifiable and useful for improving the Solver. The updated Solver produces new traces, enabling thetask curriculumto adapt over successive rounds. AcrossSWE-bench Verified,SWE-bench Lite,SWE-bench Pro, andTerminal-Bench 2.0, Socratic-SWE consistently improves overself-evolving baselinesunder the same compute budget, reaching 50.40% onSWE-bench Verifiedafter three iterations. These results suggest that solving traces can serve as a scalable substrate for self-evolving SWE agents.

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