BuildBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Compiling Real-World Open-Source
  Software
Authors: name: Zehua Zhang; name: Ati Priya Bajaj; name: Divij Handa; name: Siyu Liu; name: Arvind S Raj; name: Hongkai Chen; name: Hulin Wang; name: Yibo Liu; name: Zion Leonahenahe Basque; name: Souradip Nath; name: Vishal Juneja; name: Nikhil Chapre; name: Yan Shoshitaishvili; name: Adam Doupé; name: Chitta Baral; name: Ruoyu Wang
Published: 2025-09-27 03:02:46

Abstract: Automatically compiling open-source software (OSS) projects is a vital,
labor-intensive, and complex task, which makes it a good challenge for LLM
Agents. Existing methods rely on manually curated rules and workflows, which
cannot adapt to OSS that requires customized configuration or environment
setup. Recent attempts using Large Language Models (LLMs) used selective
evaluation on a subset of highly rated OSS, a practice that underestimates the
realistic challenges of OSS compilation. In practice, compilation instructions
are often absent, dependencies are undocumented, and successful builds may even
require patching source files or modifying build scripts. We propose a more
challenging and realistic benchmark, BUILD-BENCH, comprising OSS that are more
diverse in quality, scale, and characteristics. Furthermore, we propose a
strong baseline LLM-based agent, OSS-BUILD-AGENT, an effective system with
enhanced build instruction retrieval module that achieves state-of-the-art
performance on BUILD-BENCH and is adaptable to heterogeneous OSS
characteristics. We also provide detailed analysis regarding different
compilation method design choices and their influence to the whole task,
offering insights to guide future advances. We believe performance on
BUILD-BENCH can faithfully reflect an agent's ability to tackle compilation as
a complex software engineering tasks, and, as such, our benchmark will spur
innovation with a significant impact on downstream applications in the fields
of software development and software security.