How Far Can We Go with Practical Function-Level Program Repair?

TL;DR

This paper explores the effectiveness of Large Language Models in function-level automated program repair, demonstrating that auxiliary information and a dual-LLM framework significantly improve repair success rates without relying on statement-level fault localization.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive study of LLM-based function-level APR, introduces the SRepair technique leveraging auxiliary information, and achieves state-of-the-art repair performance on Defects4J datasets.

Findings

Zero-shot LLMs are already effective for function-level repair.

Auxiliary repair-relevant information significantly boosts repair performance.

SRepair fixes 300 single-function bugs and 32 multi-function bugs in Defects4J.

Abstract

Recently, multiple Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to enhance the repair performance. While these techniques mainly focus on the single-line or hunk-level repair, they face significant challenges in real-world application due to the limited repair task scope and costly statement-level fault localization. However, the more practical function-level APR, which broadens the scope of APR task to fix entire buggy functions and requires only cost-efficient function-level fault localization, remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of LLM-based function-level APR including investigating the effect of the few-shot learning mechanism and the auxiliary repair-relevant information. Specifically, we adopt six widely-studied LLMs and construct a benchmark in both the Defects4J 1.2 and 2.0 datasets. Our study demonstrates that LLMs with zero-shot learning are already powerful function-level APR techniques, while applying the few-shot learning mechanism leads to disparate repair performance. Moreover, we find that directly applying the auxiliary repair-relevant information to LLMs significantly increases function-level repair performance. Inspired by our findings, we propose an LLM-based function-level APR technique, namely SRepair, which adopts a dual-LLM framework to leverage the power of the auxiliary repair-relevant information for advancing the repair performance. The evaluation results demonstrate that SRepair can correctly fix 300 single-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, largely surpassing all previous APR techniques by at least 85%, without the need for the costly statement-level fault location information. Furthermore, SRepair successfully fixes 32 multi-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, which is the first time achieved by any APR technique ever to our best knowledge.