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You Name It, I Run It: An LLM Agent to Execute Tests of Arbitrary Projects

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arxiv 2412.10133 v2 pith:N2F3EIYP submitted 2024-12-13 cs.SE cs.AI

classification cs.SEcs.AI
keywords testprojectsdifferentprojectcodetoolsagentapproach
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The ability to execute the test suite of a project is essential in many scenarios, e.g., to assess code quality and code coverage, to validate code changes made by developers or automated tools, and to ensure compatibility with dependencies. Despite its importance, executing the test suite of a project can be challenging in practice because different projects use different programming languages, software ecosystems, build systems, testing frameworks, and other tools. These challenges make it difficult to create a reliable, universal test execution method that works across different projects. This paper presents ExecutionAgent, an automated technique that prepares scripts for building an arbitrary project from source code and running its test cases. Inspired by the way a human developer would address this task, our approach is a large language model (LLM)-based agent that autonomously executes commands and interacts with the host system. The agent uses meta-prompting to gather guidelines on the latest technologies related to the given project, and it iteratively refines its process based on feedback from the previous steps. Our evaluation applies ExecutionAgent to 50 open-source projects that use 14 different programming languages and many different build and testing tools. The approach successfully executes the test suites of 33/50 projects, while matching the test results of ground truth test suite executions with a deviation of only 7.5%. These results improve over the best previously available technique by 6.6x. The costs imposed by the approach are reasonable, with an execution time of 74 minutes and LLM costs of USD 0.16, on average per project. We envision ExecutionAgent to serve as a valuable tool for developers, automated programming tools, and researchers that need to execute tests across a wide variety of projects.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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  1. LinkAnchor: An Autonomous LLM-Based Agent for Issue-to-Commit Link Recovery

    cs.SE 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

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  2. Seeing is Fixing: Cross-Modal Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs for Visual Software Issue Fixing

    cs.SE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    GUIRepair, a cross-modal LLM pipeline that converts issue screenshots into reproduction code and rendered patch screenshots into validation feedback, resolves 157/517 SWE-bench M instances with GPT-4o and 175 with o4-mini.

  3. Eradicating the Unseen: Detecting, Exploiting, and Remediating a Path Traversal Vulnerability across GitHub

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    A single vulnerable Node.js path traversal pattern was found in 1,756 GitHub projects, most rated critical, and the authors' automated pipeline produced patches, disclosures, and evidence that LLMs have learned the pattern.

  4. Self-Evolving Coding Agents

    cs.SE 2026-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A systematic survey that defines self-evolving coding agents, organizes systems into a five-category object-centered taxonomy, and analyzes when and on what evidence these agents evolve.

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