arXiv subjects

Nalin Wadhwa

Publications and source records attributed to Nalin Wadhwa.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Code Researcher: Deep Research Agent for Large Systems Code and Commit History

Large Language Model (LLM)-based coding agents have shown promising results on coding benchmarks, but their effectiveness on systems code remains underexplored. Due to the size and complexities of systems code, making changes to a systems codebase requires researching about many pieces of context, derived from the large codebase and its massive commit history, before making changes. Inspired by the recent progress on deep research agents, we design the first deep research agent for code, called Code Researcher, and apply it to the problem of generating patches to mitigate crashes reported in systems code. Code Researcher performs multi-step reasoning about semantics, patterns, and commit history of code to retrieve all relevant context from the codebase and its commit history. We evaluate Code Researcher on kBenchSyz, a benchmark of Linux kernel crashes, and show that it significantly outperforms strong baselines, achieving a crash-resolution rate (CRR) of 48%, compared to 31.5% by SWE-agent and 31% by Agentless, using OpenAI's GPT-4o model. Scaling up sampling budget to 10 trajectories increases Code Researcher's CRR to 54%. Code Researcher is also robust to model choices, reaching 67% with the newer Gemini 2.5-Flash model. Through another experiment on an open-source multimedia software, we show the generalizability of Code Researcher and also conduct ablations. Our experiments highlight the importance of global context gathering and multi-faceted reasoning for large codebases.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

BEAVER: An Efficient Deterministic LLM Verifier

As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to production systems, practitioners often need reliable methods to verify model outputs and characterize tail risk for safe deployment. While sampling-based estimates provide an ad-hoc intuition of model behavior, they offer no sound guarantees. We present BEAVER, the first practical framework for computing deterministic, sound probability bounds on LLM satisfaction of safety properties. Given a prompt & any safety property, BEAVER systematically explores the model output space using novel Token trie and Frontier data structures, maintaining provably sound bounds at every iteration. We formalize the verification problem, prove soundness of our approach, and evaluate BEAVER on 4 safety properties across 12 open-weight LLMs. BEAVER identifies 2-3x more risky instances compared to baselines while taking 1/10 of the compute budget, surfacing tail risks that loose bounds and ad-hoc evaluation misses.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

MASAI: Modular Architecture for Software-engineering AI Agents

A common method to solve complex problems in software engineering, is to divide the problem into multiple sub-problems. Inspired by this, we propose a Modular Architecture for Software-engineering AI (MASAI) agents, where different LLM-powered sub-agents are instantiated with well-defined objectives and strategies tuned to achieve those objectives. Our modular architecture offers several advantages: (1) employing and tuning different problem-solving strategies across sub-agents, (2) enabling sub-agents to gather information from different sources scattered throughout a repository, and (3) avoiding unnecessarily long trajectories which inflate costs and add extraneous context. MASAI enabled us to achieve the highest performance (28.33% resolution rate) on the popular and highly challenging SWE-bench Lite dataset consisting of 300 GitHub issues from 11 Python repositories. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MASAI relative to other agentic methods and analyze the effects of our design decisions and their contribution to the success of MASAI.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Frustrated with Code Quality Issues? LLMs can Help!

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality issues. However, developers need to spend extra efforts to revise their code to improve code quality based on the tool findings. In this work, we investigate the use of (instruction-following) large language models (LLMs) to assist developers in revising code to resolve code quality issues. We present a tool, CORE (short for COde REvisions), architected using a pair of LLMs organized as a duo comprised of a proposer and a ranker. Providers of static analysis tools recommend ways to mitigate the tool warnings and developers follow them to revise their code. The \emph{proposer LLM} of CORE takes the same set of recommendations and applies them to generate candidate code revisions. The candidates which pass the static quality checks are retained. However, the LLM may introduce subtle, unintended functionality changes which may go un-detected by the static analysis. The \emph{ranker LLM} evaluates the changes made by the proposer using a rubric that closely follows the acceptance criteria that a developer would enforce. CORE uses the scores assigned by the ranker LLM to rank the candidate revisions before presenting them to the developer. CORE could revise 59.2% Python files (across 52 quality checks) so that they pass scrutiny by both a tool and a human reviewer. The ranker LLM is able to reduce false positives by 25.8% in these cases. CORE produced revisions that passed the static analysis tool in 76.8% Java files (across 10 quality checks) comparable to 78.3% of a specialized program repair tool, with significantly much less engineering efforts.

cs.AI↗