Cost-Effective Repository Exploration for Agentic Issue Localization
Repository exploration is a distinct and costly stage of coding-agent pipelines: before generating a patch, an agent must identify which repository files are likely to matter. We study whether this stage can be delegated to lower-cost models while retaining useful localization quality. Using our IssueLoc-Bench, we evaluate five explorer models under the same read-only interactive interface on 499 SWE-bench Verified-derived tasks and 500 tasks from 153 additional repositories. We measure early candidate discovery, top-three gold-file coverage, strict file-set recovery, agent time, and token usage, with paired instance-level uncertainty and repository-clustered sensitivity analysis. The hig...
| Authors | Mohammad Nour Al Awad, Sergey Ivanov |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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