CrashTranslator: Automatically Reproducing Mobile Application Crashes Directly from Stack Trace

TL;DR

CrashTranslator uses a large language model and reinforcement learning to automatically reproduce mobile app crashes from stack traces, significantly reducing effort and time compared to existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining LLMs and reinforcement learning to reproduce crashes solely from stack traces, addressing a key gap in existing crash reproduction techniques.

Findings

Successfully reproduces 61.3% of crashes, outperforming baselines by over 100%.

Reduces crash reproduction time to an average of 68.7 seconds.

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and speed.

Abstract

Crash reports are vital for software maintenance since they allow the developers to be informed of the problems encountered in the mobile application. Before fixing, developers need to reproduce the crash, which is an extremely time-consuming and tedious task. Existing studies conducted the automatic crash reproduction with the natural language described reproducing steps. Yet we find a non-neglectable portion of crash reports only contain the stack trace when the crash occurs. Such stack-trace-only crashes merely reveal the last GUI page when the crash occurs, and lack step-by-step guidance. Developers tend to spend more effort in understanding the problem and reproducing the crash, and existing techniques cannot work on this, thus calling for a greater need for automatic support. This paper proposes an approach named CrashTranslator to automatically reproduce mobile application crashes directly from the stack trace. It accomplishes this by leveraging a pre-trained Large Language Model to predict the exploration steps for triggering the crash, and designing a reinforcement learning based technique to mitigate the inaccurate prediction and guide the search holistically. We evaluate CrashTranslator on 75 crash reports involving 58 popular Android apps, and it successfully reproduces 61.3% of the crashes, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines by 109% to 206%. Besides, the average reproducing time is 68.7 seconds, outperforming the baselines by 302% to 1611%. We also evaluate the usefulness of CrashTranslator with promising results.