ORACLE-SWE: Quantifying the Contribution of Oracle Information Signals on SWE Agents
arXiv cs.CL / 4/10/2026
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Key Points
- The paper introduces Oracle-SWE, a unified approach for isolating and extracting key “oracle” information signals (e.g., reproduction/regression tests, edit location, execution context, and API usage) from SWE benchmarks to measure their individual effect on success.
- It targets a gap in prior research by quantifying how much each signal contributes when the intermediate information is assumed to be perfectly available, rather than only studying end-to-end agent performance.
- The study further tests whether signals produced by strong language models can be used to approximate real-world settings by feeding extracted signals into a base SWE agent and measuring performance gains.
- The findings are intended to help guide research prioritization for autonomous coding/agentic software engineering systems by clarifying which contextual signals matter most.
- Overall, the work reframes SWE-agent evaluation as a controllable, signal-level ablation/attribution problem to better understand what drives agent improvements.



