A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projects
Abstract
Accurate project localization (e.g., files and functions) for issue resolution is a critical first step in software maintenance. However, existing benchmarks for issue localization, such as SWE-Bench and LocBench, are limited. They focus predominantly on pull-request issues and code locations, ignoring other evidence and non-code files such as commits, comments, configurations, and documentation. To address this gap, we introduce MULocBench, a comprehensive dataset of 1,100 issues from 46 popular GitHub Python projects. Comparing with existing benchmarks, MULocBench offers greater diversity in issue types, root causes, location scopes, and file types, providing a more realistic testbed for evaluation. Using this benchmark, we assess the performance of state-of-the-art localization methods and five LLM-based prompting strategies. Our results reveal significant limitations in current techniques: even at the file level, performance metrics (Acc@5, F1) remain below 40%. This underscores the challenge of generalizing to realistic, multi-faceted issue resolution. To enable future research on project localization for issue resolution, we publicly release MULocBench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/somethingone/MULocBench.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.25242,
title = {A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projects},
author = {Zejun Zhang and Jian Wang and Qingyun Yang and Yifan Pan and Yi Tang and Yi Li and Zhenchang Xing and Tian Zhang and Xuandong Li and Guoan Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25242},
year = {2025}
}