NLP Lineage

10 October 2023 · Reasoning

SWE-bench

SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?

C. Jimenez, J. Yang, A. Wettig, S. Yao, K. Pei, O. Press, K. Narasimhan

Date
10 October 2023
What the date marks
arXiv submission
Kind
Dataset
Organisation
Princeton / U. Chicago
Access
MIT
Other dates
ICLR 2024
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 13. Models that act
Learning phases
7. Agents

A milestone: 4 later milestones descend directly from it, and its descendants reach 4 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (arxiv.org)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Code benchmarks asked for self-contained functions judged by unit tests.

The problem

Real engineering means navigating a repository and editing several files, which HumanEval does not test.

What it introduced

Real GitHub issues with their real test suites. The best model of the day resolved under 2%.

Why it matters

It gave agents a hard, honest target, and became the number every coding model is now judged on.

What modern models inherit

Repository-level task completion as the measure of an agent.

What came next

SWE-agent, Devin, and the climb past 80% by late 2025.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

SWE-bench has 37 documented ancestors across 8 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 16 turning points among them.

SWE-bench has 37 documented ancestors across 8 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

SWE-bench has 39 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 8 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 16 turning points among them.

SWE-bench has 39 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 8 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2023SWE-benchThis milestone.
  2. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointSWE-bench was influenced by thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  3. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  4. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  5. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  6. 2021Codex / HumanEvalSWE-bench built directly on thisChapter 13. Models that act
  7. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  8. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointCodex / HumanEval built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  9. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  10. 2019T5 Turning pointFLAN was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  11. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  12. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  13. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  14. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointScaling laws was influenced by this
    GPT-3 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  15. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  16. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  17. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  18. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  19. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  20. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  21. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  22. 2017Transformer Turning pointScaling laws built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  23. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  24. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  25. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  26. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  27. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  28. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  29. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  30. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  31. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  32. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  33. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  34. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  35. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  36. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  37. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  38. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2023SWE-benchThis milestone.
  2. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointSWE-bench was influenced by thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  3. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  4. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  5. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  6. 2021Codex / HumanEvalSWE-bench built directly on thisChapter 13. Models that act
  7. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  8. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointCodex / HumanEval built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  9. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-4 built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  10. 2019T5 Turning pointFLAN was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  11. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  12. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  13. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  14. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointScaling laws was influenced by this
    GPT-3 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  15. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  16. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  17. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  18. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  19. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  20. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  21. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  22. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  23. 2017Transformer Turning pointScaling laws built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  24. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  25. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  26. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  27. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  28. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  29. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  30. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  31. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  32. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  33. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  34. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  35. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  36. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  37. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  38. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  39. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  40. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

SWE-bench has 11 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Claude Opus 5.5 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

SWE-bench has 11 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Claude Opus 5.5 in 2026. Showing all of them.

SWE-bench has 12 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Claude Opus 5.5 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

SWE-bench has 12 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Claude Opus 5.5 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2023SWE-benchThis milestone.
  2. 2024Devinbuilt directly on SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  3. 2024SWE-agentbuilt directly on SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  4. 2025Claude 4was influenced by SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  5. 2025Claude Sonnet 4.5built directly on Claude 4Chapter 13. Models that act
  6. 2025Claude Opus 4.5was influenced by SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  7. 2026Claude Opus 4.6built directly on Claude Opus 4.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  8. 2026Claude Opus 4.7built directly on Claude Opus 4.6Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  9. 2026Claude Opus 4.8built directly on Claude Opus 4.7Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  10. 2026Claude Sonnet 5succeeded Claude Opus 4.8Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  11. 2026Claude Opus 5succeeded Claude Opus 4.8Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  12. 2026Claude Opus 5.5built directly on Claude Opus 5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  1. 2023SWE-benchThis milestone.
  2. 2024Devinbuilt directly on SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  3. 2024SWE-agentbuilt directly on SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  4. 2025Claude Codewas influenced by SWE-agent (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  5. 2025Claude 4was influenced by SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  6. 2025Claude Sonnet 4.5built directly on Claude 4Chapter 13. Models that act
  7. 2025Claude Opus 4.5was influenced by SWE-benchChapter 13. Models that act
  8. 2026Claude Opus 4.6built directly on Claude Opus 4.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  9. 2026Claude Opus 4.7built directly on Claude Opus 4.6Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  10. 2026Claude Opus 4.8built directly on Claude Opus 4.7Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  11. 2026Claude Sonnet 5succeeded Claude Opus 4.8Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  12. 2026Claude Opus 5succeeded Claude Opus 4.8Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  13. 2026Claude Opus 5.5built directly on Claude Opus 5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Influenced by

What it led to

Built on directly by

Influenced