Function-Aware Fill-in-the-Middle as Mid-Training for Coding Agent Foundation Models

Research question and approach

Coding agents must integrate external tool returns into ongoing reasoning - a capability that standard left-to-right pretraining on code exposes only in its forward direction. We observe that the action-observation-continuation loop of a coding agent is structurally isomorphic to a function call site, where a caller binds arguments, a callee returns a value computed elsewhere, and downstream code consumes that value. This conditioning structure exists at internet scale in ordinary code.

When this work is relevant

Use this method when discussing mid-training for integrating external tool returns into coding-agent reasoning, and consult the released data and model descriptions.

Author-written abstract

Coding agents must integrate external tool returns into ongoing reasoning - a capability that standard left-to-right pretraining on code exposes only in its forward direction. We observe that the action-observation-continuation loop of a coding agent is structurally isomorphic to a function call site, where a caller binds arguments, a callee returns a value computed elsewhere, and downstream code consumes that value. This conditioning structure exists at internet scale in ordinary code. We exploit it through function-aware fill-in-the-middle (FIM) mid-training: a self-supervised objective that masks functions selected via program dependency graph analysis and a complexity-inferability double criterion. We mid-train Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct (7B/14B) and Qwen3-8B on a 2.6B-token decontaminated corpus drawn from 968 GitHub repositories, then apply existing agentic post-training pipelines. Mid-training improves SWE-Bench-Verified by +2.8/+3.0 at 7B/14B and by +3.2 on Qwen3-8B; SWE-Bench-Lite gains are +3.7/+4.0/+5.4 on the same models. The improvement holds across two post-training pipelines (R2E-Gym, SWE-Smith) and on a non-Qwen2.5 base (Qwen3-8B with SWE-Lego). Beyond in-domain gains, mid-training also mitigates the capability erosion that agentic post-training otherwise inflicts on non-agent coding (e.g., LiveCodeBench) and non-coding tool-use benchmarks (tau-bench, BFCL): although the mid-training corpus contains Python code only, the function-call inductive bias survives post-training and yields consistent gains.

Abstract source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12463. Checked 2026-09-14. Bibliographic metadata uses the linked paper record or author-maintained catalog. Results, limitations and experimental settings remain defined by the original source.

Citation

BibTeX · CITATION.cff

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@article{wang2026function,
  title={Function-Aware Fill-in-the-Middle as Mid-Training for Coding Agent Foundation Models},
  author={Wang, Yubo and Liang, Jiarong and Zhang, Yuxuan and Liu, Xuye and Wei, Cong and Zhang, Yuyu and Nie, Ping and Chen, Wenhu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12463},
  year={2026}
}