TimeMachine-bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Capabilities in Repository-Level Migration Tasks

Ryo Fujii, Makoto Morishita, Kazuki Yano, Jun Suzuki


Abstract
With the advancement of automated software engineering, research focus is increasingly shifting toward practical tasks reflecting the day-to-day work of software engineers.Among these tasks, software migration, a critical process of adapting code to evolving environments, has been largely overlooked.In this study, we introduce TimeMachine-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate software migration in real-world Python projects.Our benchmark consists of GitHub repositories whose tests begin to fail in response to dependency updates.The construction process is fully automated, enabling live updates of the benchmark.Furthermore, we curated a human-verified subset to ensure problem solvability.We evaluated agent-based baselines built on top of 11 models, including both strong open-weight and state-of-the-art LLMs on this verified subset.Our results indicated that, while LLMs show some promise for migration tasks, they continue to face substantial reliability challenges, including spurious solutions that exploit low test coverage and unnecessary edits stemming from suboptimal tool-use strategies.Our dataset and implementation are available at https://github.com/tohoku-nlp/timemachine-bench.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.385
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8233–8264
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.385/
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Cite (ACL):
Ryo Fujii, Makoto Morishita, Kazuki Yano, and Jun Suzuki. 2026. TimeMachine-bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Capabilities in Repository-Level Migration Tasks. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8233–8264, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TimeMachine-bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Capabilities in Repository-Level Migration Tasks (Fujii et al., EACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.385.pdf