A Large-scale Empirical Review of Patch Correctness Checking Approaches
Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have drawn wide attention from both academia and industry. Meanwhile, one main limitation with the current state-of-the-art APR tools is that patches passing all the original tests are not necessarily the correct ones wanted by developers, i.e., the plausible patch problem. To date, various Patch-Correctness Checking (PCC) techniques have been proposed to address this important issue. However, they are only evaluated on very limited datasets as the APR tools used for generating such patches can only explore a small subset of the search space of possible patches, posing serious threats to external validity to existing PCC studies. In this paper, we construct an extensive PCC dataset (the largest manually labeled PCC dataset to our knowledge) to revisit all state-of-the-art PCC techniques. More specifically, our PCC dataset includes 1,988 patches generated from the recent PraPR APR tool, which leverages highly-optimized bytecode-level patch executions and can exhaustively explore all possible plausible patches within its large predefined search space (including well-known fixing patterns from various prior APR tools). Our extensive study of representative PCC techniques on the new dataset has revealed various surprising findings, including: 1) the assumption made by existing static PCC techniques that correct patches are more similar to buggy code than incorrect plausible patches no longer holds, 2) state-of-the-art learning-based techniques tend to suffer from the dataset overfitting problem, 3) while dynamic techniques overall retain their effectiveness on our new dataset, their performance drops substantially on patches with more complicated changes and 4) the very recent naturalness-based techniques can substantially outperform traditional static techniques and could be a promising direction for PCC. Based on our findings, we also provide various guidelines/suggestions for advancing PCC in the near future.
Wed 6 DecDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
16:00 - 18:00 | Automated Repair IIJournal First / Research Papers at Golden Gate C3 Chair(s): Luciano Baresi Politecnico di Milano | ||
16:00 15mTalk | A Large-scale Empirical Review of Patch Correctness Checking Approaches Research Papers Jun Yang UIUC, Yuehan Wang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yiling Lou Fudan University, Ming Wen Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Lingming Zhang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Media Attached | ||
16:15 15mTalk | Program Repair Guided by Datalog-Defined Static Analysis Research Papers Yu Liu Beijing University of Technology, Sergey Mechtaev University College London, Pavle Subotic Microsoft, Abhik Roychoudhury National University of Singapore Media Attached | ||
16:30 15mTalk | SynShine: Improved Fixing of Syntax Errors Journal First Toufique Ahmed University of California at Davis, Noah Rose Ledesma UC Davis, Prem Devanbu University of California at Davis Media Attached | ||
16:45 15mTalk | Baldur: Whole-Proof Generation and Repair with Large Language Models Research Papers Emily First University of California, San Diego, Markus Rabe Google, Talia Ringer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yuriy Brun University of Massachusetts Media Attached | ||
17:00 15mTalk | KG4CraSolver: Recommending Crash Solutions via Knowledge Graph Research Papers Xueying Du Fudan University, Yiling Lou Fudan University, Mingwei Liu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Tianyong Yang Fudan University Pre-print Media Attached | ||
17:15 15mTalk | [Remote] Automated and Context-Aware Repair of Color-Related Accessibility Issues for Android Apps Research Papers Yuxin Zhang Tianjin University, Sen Chen College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Lingling Fan College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, Chunyang Chen Monash University, Xiaohong Li Tianjin University Media Attached | ||
17:30 15mTalk | [Remote] Semantic Test Repair for Web applications Research Papers Xiaofang Qi School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Xiang Qian School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Yanhui Li Nanjing University Media Attached |