Papers for

software test authors

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Coding agents struggle to develop complex ai infrastructure tasks

InfraDev: Can Coding Agents Develop AI Infrastructure, and How Can We Tell?

Abstract: Coding agents are beginning to develop the production-grade AI infrastructure that trains and serves large models, yet existing benchmarks cover only single kernels or single-GPU tasks, and grade with tests and prompts that misjudge both correct and incorrect patches. We introduce InfraDev, a benchmark of 36 tasks built from real-world pull requests to Megatron-LM, vLLM, and verl, covering infrastructure development for training, inference, and reinforcement learning. Each task asks an agent to reimplement a real change that spans many files and must run correctly across many GPUs. To grade such changes, we jointly synthesize hidden probes, which enforce the requirements the original tests leave unchecked, and a prompt that states every interface the probes call without revealing the solution. We also design a shared execution environment that reuses dependencies and artifacts across tasks, cutting storage by 52-57% and build time by 13-14% on Megatron-LM and vLLM. Across six frontier models, the best resolves only 38.9% of the tasks; the probes reject 32% of the submissions that pass every official test, and with the original pull request descriptions as prompts, no model resolves a single task. Failure analysis shows that structural and state errors dominate and that agents' own tests rarely check memory, time, or traffic. Turning these findings into an agent skill raises the resolved rate of a frontier model on the Megatron-LM tasks by 10.5%.

Tue 27 OctArtificial IntelligenceDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Building the software that trains and runs large AI models is very complex and involves many parts working together. The authors created InfraDev, a set of real-life coding problems where AI helpers try to make important fixes and improvements to this AI infrastructure. They found that current AI coding agents perform poorly on these tough tasks, often making mistakes that existing tests miss. The authors also showed that by teaching agents to better test for errors like memory usage and performance, the success rate improves noticeably.
Open → 2610.36589v1