SWEPatchTest: Evaluating Software Tests Beyond Reproduction

Hua Lu, Pengcheng Wang, Han Li, Zichen Tian, Yanyu Chen +2

Coding agents use generated tests to decide whether a proposed patch satisfies an issue's requirements. A suite that fails on the buggy program and passes after applying the reference patch can still accept an incorrect patch or reject a correct patch. We introduce SWEPATCHTEST, a test-generation benchmark with 619 tasks from SWE-bench Pro, SWE-bench Multilingual, and DeepSWE and 82,579 candidate patches collected from coding-agent trajectories. By replaying each suite on the buggy and patched codebases, \benchmark jointly measures issue reproduction, acceptance of correct patches, and rejection of incorrect patches. Joint Validation Rate (JVR), which requires all three criteria on the same task, exposes failures hidden by single-reference evaluation: the best-performing configuration achieves only 9.21% JVR despite reproducing the reference transition on 59.29% of tasks. We further use validation scores to select and scale demonstrations for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The resulting training recipe approximately triples JVR and improves downstream repair across three SWE-bench benchmarks. Patch discrimination thus provides both a diagnostic measure of test quality and an…