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Automated fault localization requires connecting an observed test failure to the responsible method across thousands of candidates--a task that purely statistical approaches handle with limited precision and that LLMs cannot yet handle at…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mahdi Farzandway , Fatemeh Ghassemi

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks, particularly in automated program repair. However, the effectiveness of such repairs is highly dependent on the performance of upstream fault…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-24 YingJian Xiao , RongQun Hu , WeiWei Gong , HongWei Li , AnQuan Jie

In this paper, we propose DeepRL4FL, a deep learning fault localization (FL) approach that locates the buggy code at the statement and method levels by treating FL as an image pattern recognition problem. DeepRL4FL does so via novel code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Yi Li , Shaohua Wang , Tien N. Nguyen

Context: Fault localization (FL) is the key activity while debugging a program. Any improvement to this activity leads to significant improvement in total software development cost. There is an internal linkage between the program spectrum…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Arpita Dutta , Rajib Mall

Software failures remain a major challenge in modern software development, and identifying the code elements responsible for failures is a time-consuming debugging task. While extensive research has focused on fault localization in the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Golnaz Gharachorlu , Mahsa Panahandeh , Lionel C. Briand , Ruifeng Gao , Ruiyuan Wan

Logical vulnerabilities in software stem from flaws in program logic rather than memory safety, which can lead to critical security failures. Although existing automated program repair techniques primarily focus on repairing memory…

Fault localization in modern processor design code is a critical yet time-consuming step during processor verification. While recent advances in LLM-based techniques for module-level hardware design have shown promising results,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zizhen Liu , Xiaoguang Mao , Deheng Yang , Jiayu He , Yihao Qin , Guangda Zhang , Yan Lei , Jianjun Xu , Jiang Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code completion. However, the training data used to develop these models often contain a significant amount of buggy code. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Liwei Guo , Sixiang Ye , Zeyu Sun , Xiang Chen , Yuxia Zhang , Bo Wang , Jie M. Zhang , Zheng Li , Yong Liu

Large language model (LLM)-based debugging systems can generate failure explanations, but these explanations may be incomplete or incorrect. Misleading explanations are harmful for downstream tasks (e.g., bug triage, bug fixing). We…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Julius Porbeck , Christian Medeiros Adriano , Holger Giese

Context: Automated fault localisation aims to assist developers in the task of identifying the root cause of the fault by narrowing down the space of likely fault locations. Simulating variants of the faulty program called mutants, several…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Jinhan Kim , Gabin An , Robert Feldt , Shin Yoo

With advances in large language models (LLMs), new opportunities have emerged to develop tools that support the digital hardware design process. In this work, we explore how LLMs can assist with explaining the root cause of design issues…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Siyu Qiu , Muzhi Wang , Raheel Afsharmazayejani , Mohammad Moradi Shahmiri , Benjamin Tan , Hammond Pearce

As Large Language Models (LLMs) show their capabilities across various applications, training customized LLMs has become essential for modern enterprises. However, due to the complexity of LLM training, which requires massive computational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Zhihan Jiang , Junjie Huang , Zhuangbin Chen , Yichen Li , Guangba Yu , Cong Feng , Yongqiang Yang , Zengyin Yang , Michael R. Lyu

In a buggy configurable system, configuration-dependent bugs cause the failures in only certain configurations due to unexpected interactions among features. Manually localizing configuration-dependent faults in configurable systems could…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Son Nguyen

Fault localization (FL) is a critical but time-consuming task in software debugging, aiming to identify faulty code elements. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for FL, they often struggle with complex…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xinyu Shi , Zhenhao Li , An Ran Chen

Modern Java projects increasingly adopt static analysis tools that prevent null-pointer exceptions by treating nullness as a type property. However, integrating such tools into large, existing codebases remains a significant challenge.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Nima Karimipour , Pascal Joos , Michael Pradel , Martin Kellogg , Manu Sridharan

Software bugs are prevalent in modern software systems and notoriously hard to debug manually. Therefore, a large body of research efforts have been dedicated to automated software debugging, including both automated fault localization and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-04 Yiling Lou , Ali Ghanbari , Xia Li , Lingming Zhang , Dan Hao , Lu Zhang

Abrupt and unexpected terminations of software are termed as software crashes. They can be challenging to analyze. Finding the root cause requires extensive manual effort and expertise to connect information sources like stack traces,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Neetha Jambigi , Bartosz Bogacz , Moritz Mueller , Thomas Bach , Michael Felderer

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been suggested for use in automated vulnerability repair, but benchmarks showing they can consistently identify security-related bugs are lacking. We thus develop SecLLMHolmes, a fully automated evaluation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Saad Ullah , Mingji Han , Saurabh Pujar , Hammond Pearce , Ayse Coskun , Gianluca Stringhini

Large language model-specific inference engines (in short as \emph{LLM inference engines}) have become a fundamental component of modern AI infrastructure, enabling the deployment of LLM-powered applications (LLM apps) across cloud and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Mugeng Liu , Siqi Zhong , Weichen Bi , Yixuan Zhang , Zhiyang Chen , Zhenpeng Chen , Xuanzhe Liu , Yun Ma

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved significant success across various application domains, garnering substantial attention from different communities. Unfortunately, even for the best LLM, many \textit{faults} still exist…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Qiang Hu , Jin Wen , Maxime Cordy , Yuheng Huang , Wei Ma , Xiaofei Xie , Lei Ma