Does Pass Rate Tell the Whole Story? Evaluating Design Constraint Compliance in LLM-based Issue Resolution

arXiv:2604.05955v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Repository-level issue resolution benchmarks have become a standard testbed for evaluating LLM-based agents, yet success is still predominantly measured by test pass rates. In practice, however, acceptable patches must also comply with project-specific design constraints, such as architectural conventions, error-handling policies, and maintainability requirements, which are rarely encoded in tests and are often documented only implicitly in code review discussions. This paper introduces textitdesign-aware issue resolution and presents bench, a benchmark that makes such implicit design constraints explicit and measurable. bench is constructed by mining and validating design constraints from real-world pull requests, linking them to issue instances, and automatically checking patch compliance using an LLM-based verifier, yielding 495 issues and 1,787 validated constraints across six repositories, aligned with SWE-bench-Verified and SWE-bench-Pro. Experiments with state-of-the-art agents show that test-based correctness substantially overestimates patch quality: fewer than half of resolved issues are fully design-satisfying, design violations are widespread, and functional correctness exhibits negligible statistical association with design satisfaction. While providing issue-specific design guidance reduces violations, substantial non-compliance remains, highlighting a fundamental gap in current agent capabilities and motivating design-aware evaluation beyond functional correctness.