SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context

Shuquan Lian, Juncheng Liu, Yazhe Chen, Yuhong Chen, Hui Li


Abstract
Prior representative ReAct-style approaches in autonomous Software Engineering (SWE) typically lack the explicit System-2 reasoning required for deep analysis and handling complex edge cases. While recent reasoning models demonstrate the potential of extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT), applying them to the multi-turn SWE task creates a fundamental dilemma: retaining full reasoning history leads to context explosion and "Lost-in-the-Middle" degradation, while discarding it would force the agent to redundantly re-reason at every step. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-AGILE, a novel software agent framework designed to bridge the gap between reasoning depth, efficiency, and context constraints. SWE-AGILE introduces a Dynamic Reasoning Context strategy, maintaining a "sliding window" of detailed reasoning for immediate continuity to prevent redundant re-analyzing, while compressing historical reasoning content into concise Reasoning Digests. Empirically, SWE-AGILE sets a new standard for 7B-8B models on SWE-Bench-Verified using only 2.2k trajectories and 896 tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/KDEGroup/SWE-AGILE.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.868
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
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San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
17536–17550
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.868/
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Cite (ACL):
Shuquan Lian, Juncheng Liu, Yazhe Chen, Yuhong Chen, and Hui Li. 2026. SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 17536–17550, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SWE-AGILE: A Software Agent Framework for Efficiently Managing Dynamic Reasoning Context (Lian et al., Findings 2026)
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