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:2605. 17450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As software systems grow increasingly complex, automated vulnerability repair (AVR) remains difficult because the materials available to a repair system are usually failure artifacts rather than repair guidance.
By Simiao Liu, Fang Liu, Peiding Wang, Taichuan Li, Yinghao Zhu, Xiaoli Lian, Li Zhang
arXiv:2607. 00990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based software engineering agents are increasingly developed to resolve software issues by generating patches from issue reports and code repositories.
By Yaoqi Guo, Yang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Yun Ma, Yiling Lou, Zhenpeng Chen
arXiv:2607. 18859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models have greatly advanced automated issue resolution, existing agent-based methods exhibit a fundamental limitation in their insufficient exploration of repair strategies.
By Tianyue Jiang, Yanlin Wang, Xin He, Daya Guo, Jiachi Chen, Ming Wen, Ensheng Shi, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma, Guanbin Li
arXiv:2607. 29422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability repair aims to reduce the time and effort required to patch security flaws from a vulnerability triage report.
By Michael Fu, Qiyue Mei, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Kla Tantithamthavorn
arXiv:2507. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated Program Repair (APR) seeks to automatically correct software bugs without requiring human intervention.
By Marcos Fuster-Pena, David de-Fitero-Dominguez, Antonio Garcia-Cabot, Eva Garcia-Lopez
arXiv:2608. 14863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents have advanced rapidly on single-process SWE tasks, with frontier models now clustering in the high-70s on SWE-bench Verified.
By Yibo Yan, Huijuan Wang, Junzhou He, Yizhuo Liang, Shaoyu Wang, Huanchen Sun, Seo Jin Park
The paper introduces THEMIS, a stage-aware repair workflow that externalizes the requirement-to-repair process by generating semantic interpretations, a runtime requirement-code graph, graph-derived developer guidance, retained repair rationale and patches, and post-edit audit records. A retrospective audit of 300 SWE-bench Lite cases shows that these artifacts enable cross-stage inspection, with a complete developer rationale available for 288 cases and 214 cases retaining a full audited field set. The retained records also allow systematic measurement of cross-stage correspondence, revealing high recurrence of target symbols across rationales and patches, and a preliminary improvement in resolving cases compared to a direct same-input condition.
By Zewen Tao, Shin-nosuke Ishikawa
arXiv:2608. 14065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Software bugs remain a critical challenge in development, necessitating effective Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques.
By Junchi Liu, Ali Bigdeli, Roya Daneshi, Atu Ambala, Sudipto Ghosh, Fabio Santos
arXiv:2601.19066v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating fixes and aiding fix ge...
By Runxiang Cheng, Michele Tufano, Jos\'e Cambronero, Renyao Wei, Sherry Shi, Grant Uy, Pat Rondon, Franjo Ivan\v{c}i\'c
arXiv:2607. 25873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automated Program Repair systems are advancing rapidly, yet their performance remains inconsistent.
By Ramtin Ehsani, Irene Manotas, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Preetha Chatterjee
SWE‑Gate is a new repository‑level benchmark that evaluates software engineering agents on both functional correctness and review‑derived acceptance constraints. It creates 303 repair instances from real pull‑request review comments across 75 open‑source Python projects, providing separate functional and constraint tests along with compliant and non‑compliant patches. Experiments with four LLM backends show that while 644 repairs pass functional tests, 221 fail to meet the review constraints, highlighting a gap between functional success and full repair compliance.
By Xin He, Yanlin Wang, Mingwei Liu, Jiachi Chen, Hongyu Zhang, Guanbin Li