ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues

Shanda Li, Qiuhong Anna Wei, Jingwu Tang, Valerie Chen, Nihar B Shah, Tim Dettmers, Yiming Yang, Ameet Talwalkar


Abstract
Reproducing research results from papers and released code is central to scientific progress. Existing works have introduced benchmarks to evaluate whether LLM agents can assist with reproducibility, but they are difficult to scale due to their reliance on substantial manual effort for data curation and evaluation. We introduce ReproRepo, a scalable framework for reproducibility evaluation that leverages human-raised GitHub issues as naturally occurring supervision on realistic reproduction blockers. We instantiate ReproRepo on 1,149 recent machine learning papers from major conferences and evaluate four frontier model-agent configurations. Our results show that LLM agents, even without executing code, can identify many real-world reproducibility problems from paper-repository pairs: the best agent in our study, namely Codex with GPT-5.5, surfaces at least one semantically related human-reported blocker for ∼90% of papers in the study. Further analysis shows that agents are particularly effective for surfacing visible failures and identifying the right semantic region, but may still be insufficient in exact localization. ReproRepo can serve as a reusable, scalable framework for future evaluations of LLM agents on real-world reproducibility auditing. Our code is released at https://github.com/LithiumDA/ReproRepo.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2423
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
55018–55036
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2423/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shanda Li, Qiuhong Anna Wei, Jingwu Tang, Valerie Chen, Nihar B Shah, Tim Dettmers, Yiming Yang, and Ameet Talwalkar. 2026. ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 55018–55036, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues (Li et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2423.pdf