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arXiv · 2510.26423

Nexus: Execution-Grounded Multi-Agent Test Oracle Synthesis

Dong Huang·Mingzhe Du·Jie M. Zhang·Zheng Lin·Meng Luo·Qianru Zhang·See-Kiong Ng
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Abstract

Test oracle generation in non-regression testing is a longstanding challenge in software engineering, where the goal is to produce oracles that can accurately determine whether a function under test (FUT) behaves as intended for a given input. In this paper, we introduce Nexus, a novel multi-agent framework to address this challenge. Nexus generates test oracles by leveraging a diverse set of specialized agents that synthesize test oracles through a structured process of deliberation, validation, and iterative self-refinement. During the deliberation phase, a panel of four specialist agents, each embodying a distinct testing philosophy, collaboratively critiques and refines an initial set of test oracles. Then, in the validation phase, Nexus generates a plausible candidate implementation of the FUT and executes the proposed oracles against it in a secure sandbox. For any oracle that fails this execution-based check, Nexus activates an automated selfrefinement loop, using the specific runtime error to debug and correct the oracle before re-validation. Our extensive evaluation on seven diverse benchmarks demonstrates that Nexus consistently and substantially outperforms state-of-theart baselines. For instance, Nexus improves the test-level oracle accuracy on the LiveCodeBench from 46.30% to 57.73% for GPT-4.1-Mini. The improved accuracy also significantly enhances downstream tasks: the bug detection rate of GPT4.1-Mini generated test oracles on HumanEval increases from 90.91% to 95.45% for Nexus compared to baselines, and the success rate of automated program repair improves from 35.23% to 69.32%.

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Dong Huang, Mingzhe Du, Jie M. Zhang, Zheng Lin, Meng Luo, Qianru Zhang, See-Kiong Ng. 2025-10-30. Nexus: Execution-Grounded Multi-Agent Test Oracle Synthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26423

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