Privileged Process Supervision for Software Engineering Agents
A new arXiv paper (2605.21996) proposes privileged process supervision for software-engineering agents, using developer-authored reference patches to supervise intermediate steps. Current supervised fine-tuning methods rely on binary terminal verifiers that fail to address flawed reasoning in teacher trajectories. The approach targets effective and efficient training steps, leveraging ground-truth patches to guide agent reasoning.
Key facts
- Paper arXiv:2605.21996 proposes privileged process supervision for SWE agents
- Current SFT uses binary terminal verifiers which do not supervise intermediate flaws
- Reference patches reveal file paths, runtime behaviors, and coding conventions
- Standard pipelines discard developer-authored reference patches
- Method aims for effective (grounded, narrowing epistemic gap) and efficient (non-redundant) steps
Entities
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