Carlos E. Jimenez

Talor Abramovich, Meet Udeshi, Minghao Shao et al. · princeton, uw

Although language model (LM) agents have demonstrated increased performance in multiple domains, including coding and web-browsing, their success in cybersecurity has been limited. We present EnIGMA, an LM agent for autonomously solving Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges. We introduce new tools and interfaces to improve the agent's ability to find and exploit security vulnerabilities, focusing on interactive terminal programs. These novel Interactive Agent Tools enable LM agents, for the first time, to run interactive utilities, such as a debugger and a server connection tool, which are essential for solving these challenges. Empirical analysis on 390 CTF challenges across four benchmarks demonstrate that these new tools and interfaces substantially improve our agent's performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on NYU CTF, Intercode-CTF, and CyBench. Finally, we analyze data leakage, developing new methods to quantify it and identifying a new phenomenon we term soliloquizing, where the model self-generates hallucinated observations without interacting with the environment. Our code and development dataset are available at https://github.com/SWE-agent/SWE-agent/tree/v0.7 and https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/NYU_CTF_Bench/tree/main/development respectively.

Carlos E. Jimenez, John Yang, Alexander Wettig et al. · princeton, uw

Language models have outpaced our ability to evaluate them effectively, but for their future development it is essential to study the frontier of their capabilities. We find real-world software engineering to be a rich, sustainable, and challenging testbed for evaluating the next generation of language models. To this end, we introduce SWE-bench, an evaluation framework consisting of $2,294$ software engineering problems drawn from real GitHub issues and corresponding pull requests across $12$ popular Python repositories. Given a codebase along with a description of an issue to be resolved, a language model is tasked with editing the codebase to address the issue. Resolving issues in SWE-bench frequently requires understanding and coordinating changes across multiple functions, classes, and even files simultaneously, calling for models to interact with execution environments, process extremely long contexts and perform complex reasoning that goes far beyond traditional code generation tasks. Our evaluations show that both state-of-the-art proprietary models and our fine-tuned model SWE-Llama can resolve only the simplest issues. The best-performing model, Claude 2, is able to solve a mere $1.96$% of the issues. Advances on SWE-bench represent steps towards LMs that are more practical, intelligent, and autonomous.

Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E. Jimenez et al. · deepmind, princeton

The widespread adoption of large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard has led to unprecedented demand for these technologies. The burgeoning cost of inference for ever-increasing model sizes coupled with hardware shortages has limited affordable access and poses a pressing need for efficiency approaches geared towards high throughput and performance. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) algorithms such as data multiplexing, offer a promising solution with a many-fold increase in throughput by performing inference for multiple inputs at the cost of a single input. Yet these approaches are not currently performant enough to be deployed in modern systems. We change that by developing MUX-PLMs, a class of high throughput pre-trained language models (PLMs) trained with data multiplexing, that can be fine-tuned for any downstream task to yield high-throughput high-performance. Our novel multiplexing and demultiplexing modules proficiently entangle and disentangle inputs, and enable high-performance high throughput \muxplms{} that are competitive with vanilla PLMs while achieving 2x/5x inference speedup with only a $1-4\%$ drop on a broad suite of tasks.

Carlos E. Jimenez, Olga Russakovsky, Karthik Narasimhan · princeton

We introduce CARETS, a systematic test suite to measure consistency and robustness of modern VQA models through a series of six fine-grained capability tests. In contrast to existing VQA test sets, CARETS features balanced question generation to create pairs of instances to test models, with each pair focusing on a specific capability such as rephrasing, logical symmetry or image obfuscation. We evaluate six modern VQA systems on CARETS and identify several actionable weaknesses in model comprehension, especially with concepts such as negation, disjunction, or hypernym invariance. Interestingly, even the most sophisticated models are sensitive to aspects such as swapping the order of terms in a conjunction or varying the number of answer choices mentioned in the question. We release CARETS to be used as an extensible tool for evaluating multi-modal model robustness.

John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Joyce Yang et al.

Current benchmarks for coding evaluate language models (LMs) on concrete, well-specified tasks such as fixing specific bugs or writing targeted tests. However, human programmers do not spend all day incessantly addressing isolated tasks. Instead, real-world software development is grounded in the pursuit of high-level goals, like improving user retention or reducing costs. Evaluating whether LMs can also iteratively develop code to better accomplish open-ended objectives without any explicit guidance remains an open challenge. To address this, we introduce CodeClash, a benchmark where LMs compete in multi-round tournaments to build the best codebase for achieving a competitive objective. Each round proceeds in two phases: agents edit their code, then their codebases compete head-to-head in a code arena that determines winners based on objectives like score maximization, resource acquisition, or survival. Whether it's writing notes, scrutinizing documentation, analyzing competition logs, or creating test suites, models must decide for themselves how to improve their codebases both absolutely and against their opponents. We run 1680 tournaments (25,200 rounds total) to evaluate 8 LMs across 6 arenas. Our results reveal that while models exhibit diverse development styles, they share fundamental limitations in strategic reasoning. Models also struggle with long-term codebase maintenance, as repositories become progressively messy and redundant. These limitations are stark: top models lose every round against expert human programmers. We open-source CodeClash to advance the study of autonomous, goal-oriented code development.

John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Carlos E. Jimenez et al. · gatech, princeton

Despite recent progress in Language Models (LMs) for software engineering, collecting training data remains a significant pain point. Existing datasets are small, with at most 1,000s of training instances from 11 or fewer GitHub repositories. The procedures to curate such datasets are often complex, necessitating hundreds of hours of human labor; companion execution environments also take up several terabytes of storage, severely limiting their scalability and usability. To address this pain point, we introduce SWE-smith, a novel pipeline for generating software engineering training data at scale. Given any Python codebase, SWE-smith constructs a corresponding execution environment, then automatically synthesizes 100s to 1,000s of task instances that break existing test(s) in the codebase. Using SWE-smith, we create a dataset of 50k instances sourced from 128 GitHub repositories, an order of magnitude larger than all previous works. We train SWE-agent-LM-32B, achieving 40.2% Pass@1 resolve rate on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, state of the art among open source models. We open source SWE-smith (collection procedure, task instances, trajectories, models) to lower the barrier of entry for research in LM systems for automated software engineering. All assets available at https://swesmith.com.

Quan Shi, Carlos E. Jimenez, Shunyu Yao et al. · princeton

Recent advancements in AI reasoning have driven substantial improvements across diverse tasks. A critical open question is whether these improvements also yields better knowledge transfer: the ability of models to communicate reasoning in ways humans can understand, apply, and learn from. To investigate this, we introduce Knowledge Integration and Transfer Evaluation (KITE), a conceptual and experimental framework for Human-AI knowledge transfer capabilities and conduct the first large-scale human study (N=118) explicitly designed to measure it. In our two-phase setup, humans first ideate with an AI on problem-solving strategies, then independently implement solutions, isolating model explanations' influence on human understanding. Our findings reveal that although model benchmark performance correlates with collaborative outcomes, this relationship is notably inconsistent, featuring significant outliers, indicating that knowledge transfer requires dedicated optimization. Our analysis identifies behavioral and strategic factors mediating successful knowledge transfer. We release our code, dataset, and evaluation framework to support future work on communicatively aligned models.

Quan Shi, Carlos E. Jimenez, Stephen Dong et al. · princeton

As language models achieve increasingly human-like capabilities in conversational text generation, a critical question emerges: to what extent can these systems simulate the characteristics of specific individuals? To evaluate this, we introduce IMPersona, a framework for evaluating LMs at impersonating specific individuals' writing style and personal knowledge. Using supervised fine-tuning and a hierarchical memory-inspired retrieval system, we demonstrate that even modestly sized open-source models, such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, can achieve impersonation abilities at concerning levels. In blind conversation experiments, participants (mis)identified our fine-tuned models with memory integration as human in 44.44% of interactions, compared to just 25.00% for the best prompting-based approach. We analyze these results to propose detection methods and defense strategies against such impersonation attempts. Our findings raise important questions about both the potential applications and risks of personalized language models, particularly regarding privacy, security, and the ethical deployment of such technologies in real-world contexts.

Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E. Jimenez, Howard Chen et al.

Semantic textual similarity (STS), a cornerstone task in NLP, measures the degree of similarity between a pair of sentences, and has broad application in fields such as information retrieval and natural language understanding. However, sentence similarity can be inherently ambiguous, depending on the specific aspect of interest. We resolve this ambiguity by proposing a novel task called Conditional STS (C-STS) which measures sentences' similarity conditioned on an feature described in natural language (hereon, condition). As an example, the similarity between the sentences "The NBA player shoots a three-pointer." and "A man throws a tennis ball into the air to serve." is higher for the condition "The motion of the ball" (both upward) and lower for "The size of the ball" (one large and one small). C-STS's advantages are two-fold: (1) it reduces the subjectivity and ambiguity of STS and (2) enables fine-grained language model evaluation through diverse natural language conditions. We put several state-of-the-art models to the test, and even those performing well on STS (e.g. SimCSE, Flan-T5, and GPT-4) find C-STS challenging; all with Spearman correlation scores below 50. To encourage a more comprehensive evaluation of semantic similarity and natural language understanding, we make nearly 19K C-STS examples and code available for others to train and test their models.

John Yang, Carlos E. Jimenez, Alexander Wettig et al.

Language model (LM) agents are increasingly being used to automate complicated tasks in digital environments. Just as humans benefit from powerful software applications, such as integrated development environments, for complex tasks like software engineering, we posit that LM agents represent a new category of end users with their own needs and abilities, and would benefit from specially-built interfaces to the software they use. We investigate how interface design affects the performance of language model agents. As a result of this exploration, we introduce SWE-agent: a system that facilitates LM agents to autonomously use computers to solve software engineering tasks. SWE-agent's custom agent-computer interface (ACI) significantly enhances an agent's ability to create and edit code files, navigate entire repositories, and execute tests and other programs. We evaluate SWE-agent on SWE-bench and HumanEvalFix, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both with a pass@1 rate of 12.5% and 87.7%, respectively, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art achieved with non-interactive LMs. Finally, we provide insight on how the design of the ACI can impact agents' behavior and performance.

Vishvak Murahari, Carlos E. Jimenez, Runzhe Yang et al.

In this paper, we introduce data multiplexing (DataMUX), a technique that enables deep neural networks to process multiple inputs simultaneously using a single compact representation. DataMUX demonstrates that neural networks are capable of generating accurate predictions over mixtures of inputs, resulting in increased throughput with minimal extra memory requirements. Our approach uses two key components -- 1) a multiplexing layer that performs a fixed linear transformation to each input before combining them to create a mixed representation of the same size as a single input, which is then processed by the base network, and 2) a demultiplexing layer that converts the base network's output back into independent representations before producing predictions for each input. We show the viability of DataMUX for different architectures (Transformers, and to a lesser extent MLPs and CNNs) across six different tasks spanning sentence classification, named entity recognition and image classification. For instance, DataMUX for Transformers can multiplex up to $20$x/$40$x inputs, achieving $11$x/$18$x increase in throughput with minimal absolute performance drops of $<2\%$ and $<4\%$ respectively on MNLI, a natural language inference task. We also provide a theoretical construction for multiplexing in self-attention networks and analyze the effect of various design elements in DataMUX.