Journal of Information Systems and Business Technology
Vol 2 No 4 (2026): Journal of Information Systems and Business Technology

Retrieval-Augmented Triage for Software Engineering Agents: Source-Path and Pre-Fix Hunk Localization with Calibrated Repair-Effort Prediction on SWE-bench Verified

Eric Sullivan (Northeastern University)
Fang Wei (Virginia Tech)
Chloe Bennett (University of Arizona)
Jun Ma (University of Pittsburgh)



Article Info

Publish Date
07 Aug 2026

Abstract

Repository-scale software agents need constrained context before reasoning about a defect. This study evaluates retrieval and triage on all 500 human-validated SWE-bench Verified tasks from 12 Python repositories. Unified-diff parsing recovered 373 modified source paths and 1,220 source hunks. In the primary issue-only closed-world experiment, a leave-one-repository-out reranker achieved 0.500 Hit@1, 0.747 Recall@5, and 0.625 MRR; its MRR gain over character TF-IDF was 0.065 (95% CI 0.046-0.087; adjusted p < 0.001) and remained significant with equal repository weighting. Failing-test identifiers increased post-failure RRF MRR from 0.590 to 0.685, while issue-only word TF-IDF reached 0.684 MRR on gold-selected pre-fix hunks. Nested cross-repository calibration yielded 0.139 PR-AUC, 0.632 ROC-AUC, 0.082 Brier score, and 0.028 ECE for high-effort triage. Lexical localization was effective, but pre-execution effort forecasting remained limited; retrieval evidence, escalation, and executable repair should therefore remain separate stages.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

jisbt

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Library & Information Science

Description

Journal of Information Systems and Business Technology (JISBT) adalah jurnal ilmiah yang didedikasikan khusus untuk pengembangan keilmuan di bidang Sistem Informasi. Jurnal ini menjadi wadah untuk penyebaran hasil penelitian, inovasi teknologi, serta pemikiran kritis yang berfokus pada penerapan dan ...