arXiv AI

Self-Bootstrapping Automated Program Repair: Using LLMs to Generate and Evaluate Synthetic Training Data for Bug Repair

arXiv:2505. 07372v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel methodology for enhancing Automated Program Repair (APR) through synthetic data generation utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs).

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
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
Sep 2

Predicting Program Exit Code with LLMs and Programming Language Semantics

The paper introduces Program Executability Prediction (PrEx), a task that asks large language models (LLMs) to determine whether a program is semantically valid or invalid and, if invalid, to identify the violated formal rule. To evaluate this, the authors create a dataset of systematically generated invalid programs derived from valid ones and test open‑source coding LLMs across different semantic formalisms, semantic shifts, and program splits (human‑written, LLM‑translated, fuzzer‑generated). Results show that LLMs rely more on pre‑training priors than on the provided semantics, performing poorly on modified semantics and with increasing program complexity.

By Lara Marinov, Aditya Thimmaiah, Jayanth Srinivasa, Junyi Jessy Li, Milos Gligoric
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Large Language Models for Programming: Actually Fixing or Reimplementing Incorrect Code?

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle bug fixing versus problem solving in competitive programming. Using a dataset of ~3,000 Codeforces submissions and their human fixes, the authors compare LLM-generated patches to human patches and assess whether LLMs prefer to modify buggy code or generate new solutions. Results show that LLMs often alter more lines than necessary and sometimes produce entirely new solutions, performing better when allowed to generate solutions from scratch rather than patching existing code.

By Alexandru Stefan Stoica, Traian Rebedea, Marian Cristian Mihaescu
arXiv AI
2d ago

Are AI Coders Snitches? An Empirical Study of Pretraining Data Detection on Code Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether code large language models (CodeLLMs) inadvertently reproduce proprietary or sensitive code by evaluating seven state‑of‑the‑art training data detection (TDD) methods on eight CodeLLMs. It introduces CodeSnitch, a benchmark of 9,000 function‑level code samples across three languages, each labeled as included or excluded from training data, and applies mutation strategies based on the Type‑1 to Type‑4 code clone taxonomy to test TDD robustness. The study offers a systematic assessment of current TDD techniques for code and suggests directions for developing more effective detection methods.

By Tianlin Li, Yunxiang Wei, Zhiming Li, Aishan Liu, Qing Guo, Xianglong Liu, Dongning Sun, Yang Liu