arXiv AI

Better Understanding, Better Fixes? A Study of Hallucination in LLM-based Automated Program Repair

The paper investigates hallucination in large language model–based automated program repair (APR). It defines hallucination as producing patches or intermediate artifacts that are not grounded in available repair evidence, and analyzes it across final patches and intermediate tasks such as triggering test case identification, line coverage prediction, and additional test case generation. Experiments on 832 Defects4J bugs show that only 21.0%–55.9% of patches pass the developer test suite, with 72.7% of sampled repairs exhibiting hallucinations, often due to incorrect causal localization or repair strategies.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

Beyond Fail-to-Pass: Iterative Hardening of Co-Generated Bug Reproduction Tests and Fixes

arXiv:2607. 19843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made automated program repair (APR) increasingly practical for real-world bugs, but repairing directly from bug reports remains underconstrained.

By Yuhao Tan, Zhibang Yang, Fangkai Yang, Yuan Yao, Yu Kang, Lu Wang, Pu Zhao, Xin Zhang, Xiaoxing Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Obey, Diverge, Collapse: Blind Obedience to Incorrect Instructions Drives Code LLMs to Irrecoverable Code Semantic Collapse

arXiv:2607. 04537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code language models are now trusted collaborators in production workflows for debugging, refactoring, and iterative repair, and every benchmark that evaluates them assumes the instructions they act on are correct.

By Raj Jaiswal, Anany Singh Divy, Savar Bhasin, Adi Bajpai, Tanuja Ganu, Rajiv Ratn Shah
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Understanding Automated Program Repair Agents Through the Lens of Traceability: An Empirical Study

The paper presents a systematic analysis of five state‑of‑the‑art automated program repair agents, tracing their decision‑making across 500 real‑world repair tasks. It finds that while the agents perform well on simple fixes, they struggle with logic‑intensive bugs, often producing verbose, overfitted patches that pass tests without addressing root causes. Key bottlenecks identified include poor test generation, limited regression test selection, and reliance on primitive tooling without access to debuggers or advanced program analysis tools.

By Ira Ceka, Hailie Mitchell, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Shyam Ramji, Junfeng Yang, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray