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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2027

Launder-Bench: Can Repository-Level Agentic Code Laundering Be Detected?

Abstract

Coding agents can now rewrite repository-scale codebases while preserving tested behavior, creating a new challenge for plagiarism detection, license auditing, and software provenance. We ask whether such rewrites can still be traced to their source. Existing clone benchmarks emphasize fragments and bounded edits, while repository-transformation benchmarks evaluate functional correctness rather than provenance. Moreover, ranking the most similar source does not establish derivation when independent implementations can be similarly close. We define repository-level agentic code laundering and introduce Launder-Bench, to our knowledge the first repository-level benchmark for provenance under agentic rewriting, constructed from 282 real-world repositories. A source-hidden reconstruction protocol decomposes source behavior, reconstructs modules and repository structure, and retains rewrites only after execution-based verification. We evaluate the same provenance problem in two complementary settings: Launder-Bench-Pair contains 1,128 pairwise instances asking whether two repositories share provenance, while Launder-Bench-Attr contains 229 source-attribution instances asking which candidate is the source, with abstention when evidence is insufficient. Measured same-domain independent repositories establish how much similarity can arise without shared provenance and provide detector-specific reference bands. Existing methods remain far from saturating Launder-Bench: the strongest static method reaches only 0.66 AUROC on pairwise detection, while repository encoders rank the true source first on up to 22% of attribution queries but earn calibrated attribution credit on only 1–2%. These results reveal a systematic gap between relative code similarity and source-specific provenance evidence, providing a reproducible target for provenance detection under agentic rewriting.

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