Title: Stateful Multi-Agent Evolutionary Search for Unit Test Generation
Primary area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
Keywords: Inference-time compute, evolutionary search, multi-agent systems, non-Markovian state, unit test generation, code agent, code generation

Abstract: Recent work explores agentic inference-time techniques to perform structured, multi-step reasoning. However, stateless inference often struggles on multi-step tasks due to the absence of persistent state. Moreover, task-specific fine-tuning or instruction-tuning often achieve surface-level code generation but remain brittle on tasks requiring deeper reasoning and long-horizon dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose **stateful multi-agent evolutionary search**, a training-free framework that departs from prior stateless approaches by combining (i) persistent inference-time state, (ii) adversarial mutation, and (iii) evolutionary preservation. We demonstrate its efffectiveness in automated unit test generation through the generation of edge cases. We generate robust edge cases using an evolutionary search process, where specialized agents sequentially propose, mutate, and score candidates. A controller maintains persistent state across generations, while evolutionary preservation ensures diversity and exploration across all possible cases. This yields a generalist agent capable of discovering robust, high-coverage edge cases across unseen codebases. Experiments show our stateful multi-agent inference framework achieves substantial gains in coverage over stateless single-step baselines, evaluated on prevalent unit-testing benchmarks such as HumanEval and TestGenEvalMini and using three diverse LLM families - Llama, Gemma, and GPT. These results indicate that combining persistent inference-time state with evolutionary search materially improves unit-test generation.