@inproceedings{xu-etal-2026-scalable,
title = "Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning",
author = "Xu, Junjielong and
Tan, Boyin and
Liu, Xiaoyuan and
Peng, Chao and
Gao, Pengfei and
He, Pinjia",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1069/",
doi = "10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1069",
pages = "22603--22623",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "While language model agents have advanced software engineering, existing test-based supervision is limiting its scalability on real-world issues. The reason is twofold: (1) high-coverage tests are naturally rare in the wild, and (2) building and running test sandbox is heavy and fragile. To unlock supervision scaling, we propose R4P, a reasoning-based method that provides scaffold-agnostic rewards. R4P uses a group-wise training objective, enabling it to verify multiple patches against each other{'}s modification and gain a dense reward for supervising agents without executing tests or relying on specific agent trajectories. R4P achieves 72.2{\%} Acc. for verifying patches from SWE-bench, competitive with proprietary models. To show the downstream practical utility of R4P, we design and train an execution-free scaffold, Mini-SE, with pure RL via R4P. Mini-SE achieves 26.2{\%} Pass@1, showing a 10.0{\%} improvement over the original Qwen3-32B, and can be further improved to 32.8{\%} with R4P for test-time scaling on patch selection. The stable scaling curves illustrate that though imperfect, R4P can still reliably support downstream tasks at scale."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="xu-etal-2026-scalable">
<titleInfo>
<title>Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Junjielong</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Boyin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Xiaoyuan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Peng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pengfei</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pinjia</namePart>
<namePart type="family">He</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-462-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>While language model agents have advanced software engineering, existing test-based supervision is limiting its scalability on real-world issues. The reason is twofold: (1) high-coverage tests are naturally rare in the wild, and (2) building and running test sandbox is heavy and fragile. To unlock supervision scaling, we propose R4P, a reasoning-based method that provides scaffold-agnostic rewards. R4P uses a group-wise training objective, enabling it to verify multiple patches against each other’s modification and gain a dense reward for supervising agents without executing tests or relying on specific agent trajectories. R4P achieves 72.2% Acc. for verifying patches from SWE-bench, competitive with proprietary models. To show the downstream practical utility of R4P, we design and train an execution-free scaffold, Mini-SE, with pure RL via R4P. Mini-SE achieves 26.2% Pass@1, showing a 10.0% improvement over the original Qwen3-32B, and can be further improved to 32.8% with R4P for test-time scaling on patch selection. The stable scaling curves illustrate that though imperfect, R4P can still reliably support downstream tasks at scale.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">xu-etal-2026-scalable</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1069</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1069/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>22603</start>
<end>22623</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning
%A Xu, Junjielong
%A Tan, Boyin
%A Liu, Xiaoyuan
%A Peng, Chao
%A Gao, Pengfei
%A He, Pinjia
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F xu-etal-2026-scalable
%X While language model agents have advanced software engineering, existing test-based supervision is limiting its scalability on real-world issues. The reason is twofold: (1) high-coverage tests are naturally rare in the wild, and (2) building and running test sandbox is heavy and fragile. To unlock supervision scaling, we propose R4P, a reasoning-based method that provides scaffold-agnostic rewards. R4P uses a group-wise training objective, enabling it to verify multiple patches against each other’s modification and gain a dense reward for supervising agents without executing tests or relying on specific agent trajectories. R4P achieves 72.2% Acc. for verifying patches from SWE-bench, competitive with proprietary models. To show the downstream practical utility of R4P, we design and train an execution-free scaffold, Mini-SE, with pure RL via R4P. Mini-SE achieves 26.2% Pass@1, showing a 10.0% improvement over the original Qwen3-32B, and can be further improved to 32.8% with R4P for test-time scaling on patch selection. The stable scaling curves illustrate that though imperfect, R4P can still reliably support downstream tasks at scale.
%R 10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1069
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1069/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1069
%P 22603-22623
Markdown (Informal)
[Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1069/) (Xu et al., Findings 2026)
ACL
- Junjielong Xu, Boyin Tan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Chao Peng, Pengfei Gao, and Pinjia He. 2026. Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 22603–22623, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.