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Register a new userCURE: Code-Aware Neural Machine Translation for Automatic Program Repair
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Added by
Nan Jiang
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Automatic program repair (APR) is crucial to improve software reliability. Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) techniques have been used to fix software bugs automatically. While promising, these approaches have two major limitations. Their search space often does not contain the correct fix, and their search strategy ignores software knowledge such as strict code syntax. Due to these limitations, existing NMT-based techniques underperform the best template-based approaches. We propose CURE, a new NMT-based APR technique with three major novelties. First, CURE pre-trains a programming language (PL) model on a large software codebase to learn developer-like source code before the APR task. Second, CURE designs a new code-aware search strategy that finds more correct fixes by focusing on compilable patches and patches that are close in length to the buggy code. Finally, CURE uses a subword tokenization technique to generate a smaller search space that contains more correct fixes. Our evaluation on two widely-used benchmarks shows that CURE correctly fixes 57 Defects4J bugs and 26 QuixBugs bugs, outperforming all existing APR techniques on both benchmarks.
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We introduce Learn2fix, the first human-in-the-loop, semi-automatic repair technique when no bug oracle--except for the user who is reporting the bug--is available. Our approach negotiates with the user the condition under which the bug is observed. Only when a budget of queries to the user is exhausted, it attempts to repair the bug. A query can be thought of as the following question: When executing this alternative test input, the program produces the following output; is the bug observed? Through systematic queries, Learn2fix trains an automatic bug oracle that becomes increasingly more accurate in predicting the users response. Our key challenge is to maximize the oracles accuracy in predicting which tests are bug-exposing given a small budget of queries. From the alternative tests that were labeled by the user, test-driven automatic repair produces the patch. Our experiments demonstrate that Learn2fix learns a sufficiently accurate automatic oracle with a reasonably low labeling effort (lt. 20 queries). Given Learn2fixs test suite, the GenProg test-driven repair tool produces a higher-quality patch (i.e., passing a larger proportion of validation tests) than using manual test suites provided with the repair benchmark.
Automatic program repair (APR) has seen a growing interest in recent years with numerous techniques proposed. One notable line of research work in APR is search-based techniques which generate repair candidates via syntactic analyses and search for valid repairs in the generated search space. In this work, we explore an alternative approach which is inspired by the adversarial notion of bugs and repairs. Our approach leverages the deep learning Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) architecture to suggest repairs that are as close as possible to human generated repairs. Preliminary evaluations demonstrate promising results of our approach (generating repairs exactly the same as human fixes for 21.2% of 500 bugs).
Recent years have seen the rise of Deep Learning (DL) techniques applied to source code. Researchers have exploited DL to automate several development and maintenance tasks, such as writing commit messages, generating comments and detecting vulnerabilities among others. One of the long lasting dreams of applying DL to source code is the possibility to automate non-trivial coding activities. While some steps in this direction have been taken (e.g., learning how to fix bugs), there is still a glaring lack of empirical evidence on the types of code changes that can be learned and automatically applied by DL. Our goal is to make this first important step by quantitatively and qualitatively investigating the ability of a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to learn how to automatically apply code changes implemented by developers during pull requests. We train and experiment with the NMT model on a set of 236k pairs of code components before and after the implementation of the changes provided in the pull requests. We show that, when applied in a narrow enough context (i.e., small/medium-sized pairs of methods before/after the pull request changes), NMT can automatically replicate the changes implemented by developers during pull requests in up to 36% of the cases. Moreover, our qualitative analysis shows that the model is capable of learning and replicating a wide variety of meaningful code changes, especially refactorings and bug-fixing activities. Our results pave the way for novel research in the area of DL on code, such as the automatic learning and applications of refactoring.
The advance in machine learning (ML)-driven natural language process (NLP) points a promising direction for automatic bug fixing for software programs, as fixing a buggy program can be transformed to a translation task. While software programs contain much richer information than one-dimensional natural language documents, pioneering work on using ML-driven NLP techniques for automatic program repair only considered a limited set of such information. We hypothesize that more comprehensive information of software programs, if appropriately utilized, can improve the effectiveness of ML-driven NLP approaches in repairing software programs. As the first step towards proving this hypothesis, we propose a unified representation to capture the syntax, data flow, and control flow aspects of software programs, and devise a method to use such a representation to guide the transformer model from NLP in better understanding and fixing buggy programs. Our preliminary experiment confirms that the more comprehensive information of software programs used, the better ML-driven NLP techniques can perform in fixing bugs in these programs.
A large body of the literature of automated program repair develops approaches where patches are generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g., a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches, although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. While the state of the art explore research directions that require dynamic information or rely on manually-crafted heuristics, we study the benefit of learning code representations to learn deep features that may encode the properties of patch correctness. Our work mainly investigates different representation learning approaches for code changes to derive embeddings that are amenable to similarity computations. We report on findings based on embeddings produced by pre-trained and re-trained neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of embeddings to empower learning algorithms in reasoning about patch correctness: a machine learning predictor with BERT transformer-based embeddings associated with logistic regression yielded an AUC value of about 0.8 in predicting patch correctness on a deduplicated dataset of 1000 labeled patches. Our study shows that learned representations can lead to reasonable performance when comparing against the state-of-the-art, PATCH-SIM, which relies on dynamic information. These representations may further be complementary to features that were carefully (manually) engineered in the literature.
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