English

GREPO: A Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks on Repository-Level Bug Localization

Machine Learning 2026-02-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering

Abstract

Repository-level bug localization-the task of identifying where code must be modified to fix a bug-is a critical software engineering challenge. Standard Large Language Modles (LLMs) are often unsuitable for this task due to context window limitations that prevent them from processing entire code repositories. As a result, various retrieval methods are commonly used, including keyword matching, text similarity, and simple graph-based heuristics such as Breadth-First Search. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a promising alternative due to their ability to model complex, repository-wide dependencies; however, their application has been hindered by the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce GREPO, the first GNN benchmark for repository-scale bug localization tasks. GREPO comprises 86 Python repositories and 47294 bug-fixing tasks, providing graph-based data structures ready for direct GNN processing. Our evaluation of various GNN architectures shows outstanding performance compared to established information retrieval baselines. This work highlights the potential of GNNs for bug localization and established GREPO as a foundation resource for future research, The code is available at https://github.com/qingpingmo/GREPO.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.13921,
  title  = {GREPO: A Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks on Repository-Level Bug Localization},
  author = {Juntong Wang and Libin Chen and Xiyuan Wang and Shijia Kang and Haotong Yang and Da Zheng and Muhan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.13921},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

46 pages, 14figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:37:10.131Z