@inproceedings{cheng-etal-2026-apeiron,
    title = "Apeiron: A Scalable {LLM}-agentic Framework for Autonomous Full-lifecycle Demand-optimized Application Synthesis",
    author = "Cheng, Junyan  and
      Srivastava, Ankit  and
      Zeng, Jessie  and
      Drinic, Milenko  and
      Stokes, Jack W.",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.188/",
    pages = "3868--3899",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "We introduce Apeiron, a scalable and extensible framework for addressing *amorphous* user demands through autonomous, full-lifecycle application synthesis. Apeiron models the unstructured app development process as a heuristic optimization problem combining (i) a Computer-Use Agent (CUA) evaluator that simulates personas and demands, (ii) an *Activity Tracer* that grounds feedback in code-level interaction traces, and (iii) a *Locality Controller* that constrains changes during continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Furthermore, we introduce an innovative data generation approach using CUA-as-a-Judge to tackle data scarcity. Across 300 app scenarios, 2,400 personas, and 46,338 demands, Apeiron outperformed baselines by 10.7{\%} in CUA ratings and 27.8{\%} in user-demand task scores. The optimization process enhances task scores by 64.7{\%}, and the tracer contributes a 25.1{\%} gain. In CI/CD, Apeiron effectively restores 96.9{\%} of the pre-shift mean CUA rating in one optimization step with {\ensuremath{<}}30{\%} code changes in response to 30{\%} demand shifts. Finally, a user study ($N=18$) shows that our CUA ratings strongly correlate with human judgment (Spearman{'}s $\rho=0.685$) and that users prefer Apeiron-synthesized apps over baselines."
}