评估软件AI代理在资源受限下的综合效率,发现高准确率不等于高效。
SWE-Effi: Re-Evaluating Software AI Agent System Effectiveness Under Resource Constraints
- 提出多维度有效性指标,兼顾准确率与资源消耗
- 发现高资源消耗的失败模式,影响实际部署和训练成本
- 揭示令牌与时间预算间的效率权衡,指导项目规划
大型语言模型(LLMs)和代码代理在辅助软件工程任务(如自主修复问题、添加功能)方面展现出巨大潜力。现有软件工程人工智能评测基准(如SWE-bench)仅关注解决方案的准确性,忽视了资源受限环境下的实际有效性。这不仅是软件工程领域的问题,更是所有AI系统必须面对的核心挑战:不仅要正确,更要高效。为此,我们提出了SWE-Effi,一套新的多维有效性评估指标,将结果准确性(如问题修复率)与资源消耗(如令牌数、耗时)平衡考量。本文聚焦软件工程场景,基于SWE-bench子集重新评估主流问题修复代理的综合表现。结果表明,代理的有效性不仅取决于其架构,更取决于与基础模型的集成方式,是实现资源高效性能的关键。我们还发现了系统性挑战,如“令牌雪球效应”以及“昂贵失败”现象——代理在无法解决的任务上消耗大量资源,不仅限制实际应用,也显著增加强化学习训练中失败回滚的成本。最后,我们观察到在令牌预算与时间预算之间存在明显权衡,这对项目预算管理及依赖快速响应的可扩展强化学习至关重要。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) and code agents has demonstrated significant potential to assist software engineering (SWE) tasks, such as autonomous issue resolution and feature addition. Existing AI for software engineering leaderboards (e.g., SWE-bench) focus solely on solution accuracy, ignoring the crucial factor of effectiveness in a resource-constrained world. This is a universal problem that also exists beyond software engineering tasks: any AI system should be more than correct - it must also be cost-effective. To address this gap, we introduce SWE-Effi, a set of new metrics to re-evaluate AI systems in terms of holistic effectiveness scores. We define effectiveness as the balance between the accuracy of outcome (e.g., issue resolve rate) and the resources consumed (e.g., token and time). In this paper, we specifically focus on the software engineering scenario by re-ranking popular AI systems for issue resolution on a subset of the SWE-bench benchmark using our new multi-dimensional metrics. We found that AI system's effectiveness depends not just on the scaffold itself, but on how well it integrates with the base model, which is key to achieving strong performance in a resource-efficient manner. We also identified systematic challenges such as the "token snowball" effect and, more significantly, a pattern of "expensive failures". In these cases, agents consume excessive resources while stuck on unsolvable tasks - an issue that not only limits practical deployment but also drives up the cost of failed rollouts during RL training. Lastly, we observed a clear trade-off between effectiveness under the token budget and effectiveness under the time budget, which plays a crucial role in managing project budgets and enabling scalable reinforcement learning, where fast responses are essential.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。