Kai Cai
Author directory2026
Dockerless: Environment-Free Program Verifier for Coding Agents
Wenhao Zeng | Yuling Shi | Xiaodong Gu | Chao Hu | Chaofan Wang | Yuhao Cui | Hongting Zhou | Mengnan Qi | Jianqiao Wangni | Zhaojian Yu | Shuzheng Gao | Kai Cai | Shilin He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenhao Zeng | Yuling Shi | Xiaodong Gu | Chao Hu | Chaofan Wang | Yuhao Cui | Hongting Zhou | Mengnan Qi | Jianqiao Wangni | Zhaojian Yu | Shuzheng Gao | Kai Cai | Shilin He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Program verifiers play a central role in training coding agents, including selecting trajectories for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and providing rewards for reinforcement learning (RL). Standard execution-based verification requires running unit tests inside per-repository environments such as Docker images, incurring substantial environment setup costs. We propose Dockerless, an environment-free agentic patch verifier that evaluates generated code patches without executing them. Rather than simply matching candidate patches to references, Dockerless judges patch correctness using evidence gathered through agentic repository exploration. On a verifier evaluation benchmark, Dockerless outperforms the strongest open-source verifier by 14.3 AUC points. Using Dockerless as both the SFT trajectory filter and the RL reward enables a fully environment-free post-training pipeline. The resulting model reaches 62.0%, 50.0%, and 35.2% resolve rate on SWE-bench Verified, Multilingual, and Pro, respectively. It surpasses the Qwen3.5-9B baseline by 2.4, 8.7, and 2.9 points, matching environment-based post-training.
SWE-MEM: Learning Adaptive Memory Management for Long-Horizon Coding Agents
Shuzheng Gao | Wenhao Zeng | Zhaojian Yu | Jianqiao Wangni | Chaozheng Wang | Kai Cai | Shilin He | Michael R. Lyu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shuzheng Gao | Wenhao Zeng | Zhaojian Yu | Jianqiao Wangni | Chaozheng Wang | Kai Cai | Shilin He | Michael R. Lyu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-horizon software engineering agents often need to manage lengthy and noisy interaction histories under limited context budgets. Existing memory management methods rely on static compression workflows or rigid compression schedules, and often decouple memory decisions from task-solving performance. We present SWE-MeM, a training framework for proactive and on-demand memory management in software engineering agents. SWE-MeM provides a flexible memory tool that lets agents decide when, what, and how to compress based on trajectory state, task progress, and remaining context budget. We train agents with synthesized proactive memory-management trajectories and Memory-aware GRPO, which jointly optimizes memory management and issue resolution through memory-aware trajectory splitting and step-level credit assignment. On SWE-Bench Verified, SWE-MeM achieves 43.4% and 60.2% resolve rate with 4B and 30B models, respectively, outperforming existing memory management baselines in both performance and efficiency.