Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies

Latest papers

• Soda: An Object-Oriented Functional Language for Specifying Human-Centered Problems

  Julian Alfredo Mendez · 21 September 2026

  We present Soda (Symbolic Objective Descriptive Analysis), a language that helps to treat qualities and quantities in a natural way and greatly simplifies the task of checking correctness. We present key properties for the language motivated by the design of a descriptive language to encode complex …

• A-JIT: Agentic Just-In-Time Software Construction

  Mark Marron, Earl T. Barr · 10 September 2026

  Traditional software delivery assumes a static paradigm: code is constructed prior to execution and deployed as a fixed artifact. We present Agentic Just-In-Time Software Construction (A-JIT), a paradigm that replaces static binaries with dynamic, software systems that can perpetually evolve to meet…

• LoopsBench: From Harness Engineering to Loop Engineering in Coding Agent Evaluation

  Han Li, Zhemin Fang, Rili Feng, Yingqi Zhao, Jiaheng Liu, Pengfei Gao, He Ye, Dayi Lin, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang · 4 August 2026

  Coding agent infrastructure is shifting from harness engineering toward loop engineering as coding agents are deployed for sustained long-horizon software development. Existing benchmarks often center on localized tasks or end-state outcomes, offering limited insight into sustained execution. We int…

• AI4PLE: A Methodology for Integrating AI into Product Line Engineering

  Bedir Tekinerdogan · 27 July 2026

  Reuse-based development has become increasingly important in the creation of complex systems, offering significant opportunities to reduce costs, improve quality, and accelerate time-to-market. Product Line Engineering (PLE) provides a systematic approach to realizing this potential by enabling the …

• When to Use Which? Benchmarking Optimisers for Configurable Systems under Varying Budgets

  Chao Jiang, Yulong Ye, Tao Chen, Miqing Li · 21 July 2026

  Software configuration tuning is crucial for optimising system performance, and various optimisers have emerged over the last decade. Yet, the time required during the tuning process may vary across systems. In some systems (e.g., PostgreSQL), it may take a few minutes to measure a configuration, wh…

• SeerGuard: A Safety Framework for Mobile GUI Agents via World Model Prediction

  Xue Yu, Bo Yuan, Pengshuai Yang, Kailin Zhao, Hong Hu, Junlan Feng · 20 July 2026

  Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in automating complex tasks, yet they introduce critical safety risks where a single erroneous action can lead to irreversible consequences. Existing safety mechanisms are primarily reactive, lacking the ability t…

• Self-Improvements in Modern Agentic Systems: A Survey

  Zhe Ren, Yimeng Chen, Dandan Guo, Guowei Rong, Tonghui Li, R. B. Xiong, Qingfeng Lan, Wenyi Wang, Li Nanbo, Yibo Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, J\"urgen Schmidhuber · 16 July 2026

  Self-improving autonomous agents are moving from research prototypes to deployed systems. The primary goal is controllable evolution, or adaptation, from experience with minimal or even no human input. This survey frames modern self-improving agents as adaptive systems that convert experience into a…

• Where Did the Variability Go? From Vibe Coding to Product Lines by Regeneration

  Xhevahire T\"ernava · 9 July 2026

  In vibe coding, an emerging AI-driven paradigm, an LLM generates an entire program from a natural language prompt, but what happens to the variability that traditional software engineering carefully builds into code? To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory analysis on 10 vibe coded C/C+…

• From Application-Layer Simulation to Native Meta-Architecture: Structural Tension as an Endogenous Driver for Heterogeneous AI Evolution

  Heting Mao · 8 July 2026

  Current large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally stateless: their behavior is fully determined by input at inference time, and any higher-order cognitive architecture must be simulated at the application layer through prompt engineering and context management. This paper proposes a theoretical…

• ATM: CID-Brokered Pre-Write Admission for Multi-Agent Code Co-Synthesis

  Eagl Huang · 2 July 2026

  Multi-agent LLM systems can decompose software-engineering work into planning, generation, validation, and repair, but a narrower systems problem remains: before any governed shared mutation is applied, a system must decide which concurrently formed write intents may proceed in parallel, which requi…

• Managed Autonomy at Runtime: Gear-Based Safety and Governance for Single- and Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems

  Srini Ramaswamy, Wang Miaosheng · 2 July 2026

  Autonomous agents, whether LLM-driven software agents or robotic physical agents, face a common class of failure modes when operating without continuous human oversight: safety violations from unverified actions, behavioral instability from unconstrained loops, and continuity loss from unhandled err…

• SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions

  Mohit Raghavendra, Anisha Gunjal, Aakash Sabharwal, Yunzhong He · 30 June 2026

  We introduce SWE-Interact, a new testbed for evaluating coding agents on multi-turn, interactive, user-driven software engineering tasks. Existing frontier SWE benchmarks typically provide complete requirements upfront and evaluate agents on autonomous implementation. In contrast, SWE-Interact place…

• Instruction Bleed: Cross-Module Interference in Prompt-Composed Agentic Systems

  Ching-Yu Lin, Yifan Liu · 26 June 2026

  Practitioners of prompt-composed agentic systems report a recurring failure mode: editing one prompt module silently shifts the behavior of others despite no shared variable or executable dependency. We formalize this as compositional behavioral leakage (CBL): interference between modules sharing a …

• Constraint Tax in Open-Weight LLMs: An Empirical Study of Tool Calling Suppression Under Structured Output Constraints

  Fangzheng Li, Aimin Zhang, Chen Lv · 25 June 2026

  Tool Calling and Structured Output are two core capabilities of modern Agent systems, yet their interaction under joint deployment conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper reports a reproducible phenomenon observed in a production Agent system: when Tool Calling and JSON Schema const…

• Shepherd: Enabling Programmable Meta-Agents via Reversible Agentic Execution Traces

  Simon Yu, Derek Chong, Ananjan Nandi, Dilara Soylu, Jiuding Sun, Christopher D Manning, Weiyan Shi · 25 June 2026

  As LLM agent systems take on more complex tasks, they increasingly rely on meta-agents: higher-order agents that create, operate on and manage other agents. Meta-agent operations such as coordinating agents, halting risky actions before execution, or repairing failed runs, require runtime manipulati…

• Metis: Bridging Text and Code Memory for Self-Evolving Agents

  Zijie Dai, Siuhin He, Hui Li, Qihui Zhou, Jiajun Li, Mingcong Song, Guoping Long, Hongjie Si, Xin Yao, Lin Zhang, James Cheng, Xiao Yan · 24 June 2026

  Self-evolving agents improve over time by distilling experience from past executions and reusing it in future tasks. Existing systems represent such experience either as natural-language text injected into the agent context or as code exposed as callable tools. However, the choice between these repr…

• Beyond Global Replanning: Hierarchical Recovery for Cross-Device Agent Systems

  Shu Yao, Yuhua Luo, Qian Long, Jingru Fan, Zhuoyuan Yu, Yuheng Wang, Lin Wu, Yufan Dang, Huatao Li, Chen Qian · 19 June 2026

  Real-world computer-use tasks often span multiple applications and devices, requiring agents to coordinate heterogeneous environments under dynamic runtime failures. Existing multi-device agent systems support task decomposition and cross-device assignment, but recovery remains largely coarse-graine…

• Execution-bound advisory automation for agentic AI: a reproducible AIBOM-driven CSAF-VEX framework

  Petar Radanliev, Omar Santos, Carsten Maple, Kay Atefi · 19 June 2026

  A protocol driven framework is presented that binds SBOM and AIBOM artefacts to deterministic environment capture and structured runtime telemetry. Exploitability is computed from declared artefacts, observed activation conditions, and enforced execution policies. CSAF VEX advisories are generated f…

• SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

  Congjie Zheng, Chuanyi Xue, Bin Liang, Jun Yang, Changshui Zhang · 17 June 2026

  Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores …

• Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

  Spyridon Georgiou, Aggelos Psiris, Thomas Lagkas, Vasileios Argyriou, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Iraklis Varlamis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos · 16 June 2026

  Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable…

• OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

  Mina Mohammadmirzaei, Jeffrey Flanigan · 16 June 2026

  Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety…

• From 0-to-1 to 1-to-N: Reproducible Engineering Evidence for MetaAI Recursive Self-Design

  Dun Li, Jiatao Li, Hongzhi Li · 9 June 2026

  Recursive self-design refers to AI-assisted modification of the mechanisms by which an AI system is built, evaluated, and improved. This paper treats MetaAI not as a mature paradigm, but as a working term for a human-seeded, AI-expanded development pattern in which the design space itself becomes a …

• Capability-Aligned Hierarchical Learning for Tool-Augmented LLMs

  Haotong Yang, Ting Long, Yi Chang · 9 June 2026

  Tool learning enables LLMs to invoke external tools to accomplish tasks. Prior studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of a hierarchical structure: a high-level policy handles global planning and decomposes tasks into manageable sub-tasks, and a low-level policy focuses on invoking tools to solv…

• Benchmarking Living-Screen-Native GUI Agents on Short-Video Platforms

  Jiashu Yao, Heyan Huang, Daiqing Wu, Wangke Chen, Huaxi Ai, Haoyu Wen, Zeming Liu, Yuhang Guo · 4 June 2026

  GUI agents today assume a static screen, where the world is frozen between two actions. However, real interfaces such as short-video applications violate this assumption, as their content keeps playing, and a competent user must decide what to watch and for how long. We formalize this task as Living…

• Bridging Requirements and Architecture: Multi-Agent Orchestration with External Knowledge and Hierarchical Memory

  Ruiyin Li, Yiran Zhang, Xiyu Zhou, Yangxiao Cai, Peng Liang, Weisong Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Zhi Jin, Yang Liu · 2 June 2026

  Software architecture design is a critical yet inherently complex and knowledge-intensive phase that requires balancing competing quality attributes and adapting to evolving requirements. Traditionally, this process has been time-consuming, labor-intensive, and heavily reliant on architects, often r…