Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.37224

Spine: Compiling Subtask Trees into Structured Context for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

Jiahong Xiang·Kunqiu Chen·Lingming Zhang·Yuqun Zhang
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Long-horizon coding tasks contain nested subtasks. Typically, agents record interactions sequentially into a growing history, causing context inflation and performance degradation. Compressing or trimming the history without explicit subtask boundaries can discard information needed by unfinished subtasks. Conversely, recursive subagent delegation isolates completed subtasks through child agents by assigning every subtask boundary to delegation, which conflates subtask granularity with executing agent choice, adding execution and coordination overhead. We introduce Spine, an interface and runtime that align model context with subtask nesting and completion. An agent declares explicit subtask boundaries through work scopes, allowing the same agent to execute nested subtasks inline while reserving delegation for independent parallel tasks. The runtime organizes execution in SpineTree, a persistent tree recording subtask relations, local interactions, completion states, and returned results. Before each model call, it compiles the tree into model context just in time, retaining unfinished subtasks' interactions and replacing completed subtasks' details with their results, while preserving prefix-cache reuse. We integrate Spine into Codex to build SpineCodex. With GPT-5.6 Sol, compared with native Codex, SpineCodex improves SWE-Milestone Score by 11.8% while reducing total cost by 32.4%, improves the average ProgramBench test-pass rate by 17.3%, and improves Mean@5 on eight of the ten evaluated FrontierSWE tasks. On SWE-Milestone, it also achieves a comparable Score to Recursive Subagent at 73.7% lower total cost. We also integrate Spine into Pi through a reusable software package: with Gemini 3.8 Flash and Qwen 3.8 27B, it improves SWE-Milestone Score by 9.5-17.5% and the average ProgramBench test-pass rate by 4.3-8.7% compared with native Pi.

Explore related subjects

cs.SEcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Jiahong Xiang, Kunqiu Chen, Lingming Zhang, Yuqun Zhang. 2026-10-27. Spine: Compiling Subtask Trees into Structured Context for Long-Horizon Coding Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37224

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

From Legacy Fortran to Portable Kokkos: An Autonomous Agentic AI Workflow

Scientific applications continue to rely on legacy Fortran codebases originally developed for homogeneous, CPU-based systems. As High-Performance Computing (HPC) shifts toward heterogeneous GPU-accelerated architectures, many accelerators lack native Fortran bindings, creating an urgent need to modernize legacy codes for portability. Frameworks like Kokkos provide performance portability and a single-source C++ abstraction, but manual Fortran-to-Kokkos porting demands significant expertise and time. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in source-to-source code generation, yet their use in fully autonomous workflows for translating and optimizing parallel code remains largely unexplored, especially for performance portability across diverse hardware. This paper presents an agentic AI workflow where specialized LLM "agents" collaborate to translate, validate, compile, run, test, debug, and optimize Fortran kernels into portable Kokkos C++ programs. Results show the pipeline modernizes a range of benchmark kernels, producing performance-portable Kokkos codes across hardware partitions. Paid OpenAI models such as GPT-5 and o4-mini-high executed the workflow for only a few U.S. dollars, generating optimized codes that surpassed Fortran baselines, whereas open-source models like Llama4-Maverick often failed to yield functional codes. This work demonstrates the feasibility of agentic AI for Fortran-to-Kokkos transformation and offers a pathway for autonomously modernizing legacy scientific applications to run portably and efficiently on diverse supercomputers. It further highlights the potential of LLM-driven agentic systems to perform structured, domain-specific reasoning tasks in scientific and systems-oriented applications.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Optimizing Spectral Signature in Code Backdoor Detection

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software development workflows, they also become prime targets for adversarial attacks. Among these, backdoor attacks are a significant threat, allowing attackers to manipulate model outputs through hidden triggers embedded in training data. Detecting such backdoors remains a challenge, and one promising approach is the use of Spectral Signature defense methods that identify poisoned data by analyzing feature representations through eigenvectors. While some prior works have explored Spectral Signatures for backdoor detection in neural networks, recent studies suggest that these methods may not be optimally effective for code models. In this paper, we revisit the applicability of Spectral Signature-based defenses in the context of backdoor attacks on code models. We systematically evaluate their effectiveness under various attack scenarios and defense configurations, analyzing their strengths and limitations. We found that the widely used setting of Spectral Signature in code backdoor detection is often suboptimal. Hence, we explored the impact of different settings of the key factors. We discovered a new proxy metric that can more accurately estimate the actual performance of Spectral Signature without model retraining after the defense. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the configurations of Spectral Signature defenses in securing code models and offer insights into potential improvements for future research.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?

Agent skills, structured procedural knowledge packages injected at inference time, are increasingly used to augment LLM agents on software engineering tasks. However, their real utility in end-to-end development settings remains unclear, and no standard procedure tests an individual skill before installation. We present swe-skills-bench, a skill-centric, requirement-driven benchmark that measures how much individual agent skills improve performance on real-world software engineering (SWE) tasks. We start from 98 public SWE skills, each paired with a real GitHub repository pinned at a fixed commit. For each skill, we derive repository-specific requirements, create executable verifiers, and build a reproducible environment. Under each of four agent-model configurations, we run every task once without the skill and once with it, yielding 3,920 paired evaluations. For each requirement, we compute a paired delta, i.e., the change in outcome when the skill is added. We then aggregate these deltas across a skill's ten requirements into a per-skill utility profile, and use a statistical test to classify each skill as Golden (significantly helpful), Ineffective (no significant effect), or Harmful (significantly detrimental). Our results show that skills provide limited benefits: 92 of 98 skills have no statistically significant effect, and adding skills raises the average pass ratio only from 76.6% to 76.9%. The few helpful skills supply procedures that the agent would otherwise omit (gains of up to $+17.7$ points). In contrast, harmful skills anchor the agent on their own templates and override the task's explicit instructions (losses of up to -17.0 points). Our code is available at https://github.com/ControllableModel/SWE-Skills-Bench.

cs.SE↗