ACQUIRE: Making a Coding Agent Ask-and-Answer About a Repo Before Fixing Raises SWE-bench Verified Pass@1 by 4.4 Points

arXiv·medium signal

ACQUIRE is a QA-driven framework for software-issue resolution that decouples knowledge acquisition from patch generation: a Questioner poses targeted questions and an Answerer produces evidence-grounded answers via autonomous repo exploration, then a Resolver uses that QA knowledge to write informed patches. Unlike fix-driven pre-repair exploration that gathers imprecise context, ACQUIRE explicitly targets the agent's knowledge gaps first. On SWE-bench Verified it consistently beats representative pre-repair methods, raising Pass@1 by up to 4.4 percentage points at modest extra cost — a practical pattern for grounding coding agents before they edit.