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A long-standing open challenge for automated program repair is the overfitting problem, which is caused by having insufficient or incomplete specifications to validate whether a generated patch is correct or not. Most available repair…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Omar I. Al-Bataineh , Anastasiia Grishina , Leon Moonen

Automatic Program Repair (APR) techniques can promisingly help reducing the cost of debugging. Many relevant APR techniques follow the generate-and-validate approach, that is, the faulty program is iteratively modified with different change…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Davide Ginelli , Matias Martinez , Leonardo Mariani , Martin Monperrus

Automatic program repair (APR) aims to reduce the manual efforts required to identify and fix errors in source code. Before the rise of LLM-based agents, a common strategy was to increase the number of generated patches, sometimes to the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Fernando Vallecillos Ruiz , Max Hort , Leon Moonen

Automated Program Repair (APR) is a task to automatically generate patches for the buggy code. However, most research focuses on generating correct patches while ignoring the consistency between the fixed code and the original buggy code.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Zhenlong Dai , Bingrui Chen , Zhuoluo Zhao , Xiu Tang , Sai Wu , Chang Yao , Zhipeng Gao , Jingyuan Chen

Current automated program repair (APR) techniques are far from being practical and useful enough to be considered for realistic debugging. They rely on unrealistic assumptions including the requirement of a comprehensive suite of test cases…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Qi Xin , Haojun Wu , Steven P. Reiss , Jifeng Xuan

Background: Over the years, Automated Program Repair (APR) has attracted much attention from both academia and industry since it can reduce the costs in fixing bugs. However, how to assess the patch correctness remains to be an open…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Shangwen Wang , Ming Wen , Liqian Chen , Xin Yi , Xiaoguang Mao

In supporting the development of high-quality software, especially necessary in the era of LLMs, automated program repair (APR) tools aim to improve code quality by automatically addressing violations detected by static analysis profilers.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Sumudu Liyanage , Sherlock A. Licorish , Markus Wagner , Stephen G. MacDonell

Automated program repair (APR) has shown promising results, particularly with the use of neural networks. Currently, most APR tools focus on code transformations specified by test suites, rather than reasoning about the program intent and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-23 He Ye , Aidan Z. H. Yang , Chang Hu , Yanlin Wang , Tao Zhang , Claire Le Goues

Generate-and-validate (G&V) automated program repair (APR) techniques have been extensively studied during the past decade. Meanwhile, such techniques can be extremely time-consuming due to manipulation of the program code to fabricate a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Lingchao Chen , Lingming Zhang

Automated program repair (APR) techniques are effective in fixing inevitable defects in software, enhancing development efficiency and software robustness. However, due to the difficulty of generating precise specifications, existing APR…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Xu He , Shu Wang , Kun Sun

Repository-level automated program repair (APR) requires long-horizon reasoning over interdependent decisions. However, most LLM-based approaches reconstruct repair reasoning independently for each issue, failing to reuse successful…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Chenglin Li , Yisen Xu , Zehao Wang , Shin Hwei Tan , Tse-Hsun , Chen

Bounded verification has proved useful to detect bugs and to increase confidence in the correctness of a program. In contrast to unbounded verification, reasoning about calls via (bounded) inlining and about loops via (bounded) unrolling…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Thibault Dardinier , Gaurav Parthasarathy , Peter Müller

(Note: This work is a preprint.) Static analysis (SA) tools produce many diagnostic alerts indicating that source code in C or C++ may be defective and potentially vulnerable to security exploits. Many of these alerts are false positives.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-06 David Svoboda , Lori Flynn , William Klieber , Michael Duggan , Nicholas Reimer , Joseph Sible

Programmers frequently maintain implicit data invariants, which are relations between different data structures in a program. Traditionally, such invariants are manually enforced and checked by programmers. This ad-hoc practice is difficult…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-10-29 John Sarracino , Shraddha Barke , Hila Peleg , Sorin Lerner , Nadia Polikarpova

Verifiers that can prove programs correct against their full functional specification require, for programs with loops, additional annotations in the form of loop invariants---propeties that hold for every iteration of a loop. We show that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Juan P. Galeotti , Carlo A. Furia , Eva May , Gordon Fraser , Andreas Zeller

With the rapid development and large-scale popularity of program software, modern society increasingly relies on software systems. However, the problems exposed by software have also come to the fore. Software defect has become an important…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kai Huang , Zhengzi Xu , Su Yang , Hongyu Sun , Xuejun Li , Zheng Yan , Yuqing Zhang

Software verification of evolving systems is challenging mainstream methodologies and tools. Formal verification techniques often conflict with the time constraints imposed by change management practices for evolving systems. Since changes…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2013-05-02 Domenico Bianculli , Antonio Filieri , Carlo Ghezzi , Dino Mandrioli

Previous studies have shown that Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques suffer from the overfitting problem. Overfitting happens when a patch is run and the test suite does not reveal any error, but the patch actually does not fix the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Matias Martinez , Maria Kechagia , Anjana Perera , Justyna Petke , Federica Sarro , Aldeida Aleti

Among the many different kinds of program repair techniques, one widely studied family of techniques is called test suite based repair. However, test suites are in essence input-output specifications and are thus typically inadequate for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Zhongxing Yu , Matias Martinez , Benjamin Danglot , Thomas Durieux , Martin Monperrus

In the context of test case based automatic program repair (APR), patches that pass all the test cases but fail to fix the bug are called overfitted patches. Currently, patches generated by APR tools get inspected manually by the users to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Ali Ghanbari