Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering (SE) can offer assistance for coding. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation of LLMs in practical coding contexts, Carlos et al. introduced the SWE-bench dataset, which comprises 2,294 real-world GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests, collected from 12 widely used Python repositories. Several impressive LLM-based toolkits recently are developed and evaluated on this dataset. However, a systematic evaluation of the quality of SWE-bench remains missing. In this paper, we addressed this gap by presenting an empirical analysis of the SWE-bench dataset. We conducted a manual screening of instances where SWEAgent + GPT-4 successfully resolved issues by comparing the model-generated patches with the actual pull requests. SWE-Agent+GPT-4 was at the top of SWE-bench leaderboard during the time of our study. Our analysis reveals some critical issues with the SWE-bench dataset: 1) 32.67% of the successful patches involve cheating as the solutions were directly provided in the issue report or the comments. We refer to as solution leakage problem. 2) 31.08% of the passed patches are suspicious patches due to weak test cases, i.e., the tests were not adequate to verify the correctness of a patch. When we filtered out these problematic issues, the resolution rate of SWE-Agent+GPT-4 dropped from 12.47% to 3.97%. We also observed that the same data quality issues also exist in the two variants of SWE-bench, i.e., SWE-bench Lite and SWE-Bench Verified. In addition, over 94% of the issues were created before LLM's knowledge cutoff dates, posing potential data leakage issues.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset. Recent studies have uncovered severe data contamination issues, e.g. SWE-bench reports 32.67% of successful patches involve direct solution leakage and 31.08% pass due to inadequate test cases. We introduce SWE-MERA, a dynamic, continuously updated benchmark designed to address these fundamental challenges through an automated collection of real-world GitHub issues and rigorous quality validation. Our approach implements a reliable pipeline that ensures quality while minimizing contamination risks, resulting in approximately 10,000 potential tasks with 300 samples currently available. Evaluation using the Aider coding agent demonstrates strong discriminative power in state-of-the-art models. We report performance across a dozen recent LLMs evaluated on tasks collected between September 2024 and June 2025.

The increasing complexity of large language models (LLMs) raises concerns about their ability to "cheat" on standard Question Answering (QA) benchmarks by memorizing task-specific data. This undermines the validity of benchmark evaluations, as they no longer reflect genuine model capabilities but instead the effects of data leakage. While prior work has focused on detecting such leakage, little attention has been given to mitigating its impact and preserving the long-term utility of benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce LastingBench, a novel framework designed to continuously reinforce and safeguard existing benchmarks against knowledge leakage. LastingBench identifies leakage points in the context through perturbation, then rewrites the leakage points to counterfactual ones-disrupting memorization while preserving the benchmark's original evaluative intent. Evaluations of state-of-the-art QA benchmarks show significant performance gaps, highlighting the efficacy of LastingBench in reducing memorization effects. LastingBench offers a practical and scalable solution to ensure benchmark robustness over time, promoting fairer and more interpretable evaluations of LLMs.

An attacker can gain information of a user by analyzing its network traffic. The size of transferred data leaks information about the file being transferred or the service being used, and this is particularly revealing when the attacker has background knowledge about the files or services available for transfer. To prevent this, servers may pad their files using a padding scheme, changing the file sizes and preventing anyone from guessing their identity uniquely. This work focuses on finding optimal padding schemes that keep a balance between privacy and the costs of bandwidth increase. We consider R\'enyi-min leakage as our main measure for privacy, since it is directly related with the success of a simple attacker, and compare our algorithms with an existing solution that minimizes Shannon leakage. We provide improvements to our algorithms in order to optimize average total padding and Shannon leakage while minimizing R\'enyi-min leakage. Moreover, our algorithms are designed to handle a more general and important scenario in which multiple servers wish to compute padding schemes in a way that protects the servers' identity in addition to the identity of the files.

Diffusion models have become a cornerstone in image editing, offering flexibility with language prompts and source images. However, a key challenge is attribute leakage, where unintended modifications occur in non-target regions or within target regions due to attribute interference. Existing methods often suffer from leakage due to naive text embeddings and inadequate handling of End-of-Sequence (EOS) token embeddings. To address this, we propose ALE-Edit (Attribute-leakage-free editing), a novel framework to minimize attribute leakage with three components: (1) Object-Restricted Embeddings (ORE) to localize object-specific attributes in text embeddings, (2) Region-Guided Blending for Cross-Attention Masking (RGB-CAM) to align attention with target regions, and (3) Background Blending (BB) to preserve non-edited regions. Additionally, we introduce ALE-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating attribute leakage with new metrics for target-external and target-internal leakage. Experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces attribute leakage while maintaining high editing quality, providing an efficient and tuning-free solution for multi-object image editing.

Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counter-intuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs trained with image-text pairs. To explain such a counter-intuitive phenomenon, we discover a visual safety information leakage (VSIL) problem in existing multimodal safety benchmarks, i.e., the potentially risky and sensitive content in the image has been revealed in the textual query. In this way, MLLMs can easily refuse these sensitive text-image queries according to textual queries. However, image-text pairs without VSIL are common in real-world scenarios and are overlooked by existing multimodal safety benchmarks. To this end, we construct multimodal visual leakless safety benchmark (VLSBench) preventing visual safety leakage from image to textual query with 2.4k image-text pairs. Experimental results indicate that VLSBench poses a significant challenge to both open-source and close-source MLLMs, including LLaVA, Qwen2-VL, Llama3.2-Vision, and GPT-4o. This study demonstrates that textual alignment is enough for multimodal safety scenarios with VSIL, while multimodal alignment is a more promising solution for multimodal safety scenarios without VSIL. Please see our code and data at: http://hxhcreate.github.io/VLSBench

Foundation models are trained on increasingly immense and opaque datasets. Even while these models are now key in AI system building, it can be difficult to answer the straightforward question: has the model already encountered a given example during training? We therefore propose a widespread adoption of Data Portraits: artifacts that record training data and allow for downstream inspection. First we outline the properties of such an artifact and discuss how existing solutions can be used to increase transparency. We then propose and implement a solution based on data sketching, stressing fast and space efficient querying. Using our tools, we document a popular language modeling corpus (The Pile) and a recently released code modeling dataset (The Stack). We show that our solution enables answering questions about test set leakage and model plagiarism. Our tool is lightweight and fast, costing only 3% of the dataset size in overhead. We release a live interface of our tools at https://dataportraits.org/ and call on dataset and model creators to release Data Portraits as a complement to current documentation practices.

Recently, Talmor and Berant (2018) introduced ComplexWebQuestions - a dataset focused on answering complex questions by decomposing them into a sequence of simpler questions and extracting the answer from retrieved web snippets. In their work the authors used a pre-trained reading comprehension (RC) model (Salant and Berant, 2018) to extract the answer from the web snippets. In this short note we show that training a RC model directly on the training data of ComplexWebQuestions reveals a leakage from the training set to the test set that allows to obtain unreasonably high performance. As a solution, we construct a new partitioning of ComplexWebQuestions that does not suffer from this leakage and publicly release it. We also perform an empirical evaluation on these two datasets and show that training a RC model on the training data substantially improves state-of-the-art performance.

High-quality benchmarks are essential for evaluating reasoning and retrieval capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, curating datasets for this purpose is not a permanent solution as they are prone to data leakage and inflated performance results. To address these challenges, we propose PhantomWiki: a pipeline to generate unique, factually consistent document corpora with diverse question-answer pairs. Unlike prior work, PhantomWiki is neither a fixed dataset, nor is it based on any existing data. Instead, a new PhantomWiki instance is generated on demand for each evaluation. We vary the question difficulty and corpus size to disentangle reasoning and retrieval capabilities respectively, and find that PhantomWiki datasets are surprisingly challenging for frontier LLMs. Thus, we contribute a scalable and data leakage-resistant framework for disentangled evaluation of reasoning, retrieval, and tool-use abilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/kilian-group/phantom-wiki.