Coding Agents as Test-Suite Auditors: Finding What Official Suites Miss While Approaching What They Catch

2026-08-03Software Engineering

Software EngineeringArtificial Intelligence
AI summary

The authors studied the problem of using official online coding contest test suites as the only way to judge if code is correct, noting these suites sometimes accept buggy solutions. To fix this, they used coding agents to create new test cases that uncover hidden bugs and applied a certification process to confirm these bugs without trusting the official judge. Their approach found hundreds of bugs missed by official tests and performed well even where no official tests existed. This method helps better evaluate and train models that write code by making sure accepted solutions are truly correct.

Online JudgeTest SuiteCoding AgentAdversarial TestingCertification ChainAccepted SubmissionBug DetectionAtCoderCodeforcesBenchmarking
Authors
Shuyang Xie, Shuxiao Xie, Feng Zhu, Yanli Ji, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract
Online-judge verdicts and the datasets and benchmarks built on them are treated as ground truth for evaluating and training large language models for code. Yet prior audits have sounded a warning: official suites accept buggy submissions. These audits, however, stop at the warning and offer no practical remedy. Our remedy has two parts: an off-the-shelf coding agent, serving as a test-suite auditor, both builds adversarial test suites to expose what official suites miss and supplies these suites where no official suite exists; a certification chain determines whether each agent-flagged submission is genuinely buggy without relying on the official judge: multiple independently written accepted solutions agree on the expected output for every test, brute-force solutions settle disagreements, and a per-problem validator certifies each failing input legal. One such agent identifies 589 verified accepted-but-buggy submissions among AtCoder's 20,375 audited accepted submissions; extending the same certification to all five agents yields a union floor of 906 such submissions. Five agents, scored separately, each stay within 1.7pp of official-suite coverage on logic bugs those suites catch. On post-cutoff Codeforces problems with no available official suites, the same test-building method leads all five reproduced baselines at every tested input budget. Where an official suite exists, the agent audits suite adequacy instead of assuming it; where none exists, agent suites catch the most buggy submissions among methods we reproduced and tested.