From SWE-ZERO to SWE-HERO: Execution-free to Execution-based Fine-tuning for Software Engineering Agents

We introduce SWE-ZERO to SWE-HERO, a two-stage SFT recipe that achieves state-of-the-art results on SWE-bench by distilling open-weight frontier LLMs. Our pipeline replaces resource-heavy dependencies with an evolutionary refinement strategy: (1) SWE-ZERO utilizes large-scale, execution-free trajectories to master code semantics and repository-level reasoning, and (2) SWE-HERO applies targeted, execution-backed refinement to transition these semantic intuitions into rigorous engineering workflows. Our empirical results set a new benchmark for open-source models of comparable size. We release a dataset of 300k SWE-ZERO and 13k SWE-HERO trajectories distilled from Qwen3-Coder-480B, alongsid...

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