@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-rat,
title = "{RAT}: {R}un{A}ny{T}hing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration",
author = "Huang, Renhong and
Hua, Dongdong and
Sun, Yifei and
Ding, Sitao and
Yuan, Hanyang and
Wang, Daixin and
Yang, Yang",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2070/",
pages = "47131--47161",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Automating repository-level software engineering tasks is a foundational challenge for autonomous code agents, largely due to the difficulty of configuring executable environments. However, manual configuration remains a labor-intensive bottleneck, necessitating a transition toward fully automated environment configuration. Existing approaches often rely on pre-defined artifacts or are restricted to specific programming languages, limiting their applicability to diverse real-world repositories. In this paper, we first propose **RAT** (RunAnyThing), a modular and extensible agent framework for fully automated configuration across programming languages on arbitrary repositories. RAT adopts a multi-stage pipeline that integrates language-aware abstraction, image initialization, specialized configuration toolset, and robust sandbox. Furthermore, to enable rigorous evaluation, we propose **RATBench**, a benchmark reflects the comprehensive coverage of real-world repositories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Environment Setup Success Rate (ESSR) by an average of 36.1{\%} over strong baselines."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T RAT: RunAnyThing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration
%A Huang, Renhong
%A Hua, Dongdong
%A Sun, Yifei
%A Ding, Sitao
%A Yuan, Hanyang
%A Wang, Daixin
%A Yang, Yang
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F huang-etal-2026-rat
%X Automating repository-level software engineering tasks is a foundational challenge for autonomous code agents, largely due to the difficulty of configuring executable environments. However, manual configuration remains a labor-intensive bottleneck, necessitating a transition toward fully automated environment configuration. Existing approaches often rely on pre-defined artifacts or are restricted to specific programming languages, limiting their applicability to diverse real-world repositories. In this paper, we first propose **RAT** (RunAnyThing), a modular and extensible agent framework for fully automated configuration across programming languages on arbitrary repositories. RAT adopts a multi-stage pipeline that integrates language-aware abstraction, image initialization, specialized configuration toolset, and robust sandbox. Furthermore, to enable rigorous evaluation, we propose **RATBench**, a benchmark reflects the comprehensive coverage of real-world repositories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Environment Setup Success Rate (ESSR) by an average of 36.1% over strong baselines.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2070/
%P 47131-47161
Markdown (Informal)
[RAT: RunAnyThing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2070/) (Huang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Renhong Huang, Dongdong Hua, Yifei Sun, Sitao Ding, Hanyang Yuan, Daixin Wang, and Yang Yang. 2026. RAT: RunAnyThing via Fully Automated Environment Configuration. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 47131–47161, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.