Neural Program Repair: Systems, Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to automatically fix bugs in the source code. Recently, as advances in Deep Learning (DL) field, there is a rise of Neural Program Repair (NPR) studies, which formulate APR as a translation task from buggy code to correct code and adopt neural networks based on encoder-decoder architecture. Compared with other APR techniques, NPR approaches have a great advantage in applicability because they do not need any specification (i.e., a test suite). Although NPR has been a hot research direction, there isn't any overview on this field yet. In order to help interested readers understand architectures, challenges and corresponding solutions of existing NPR systems, we conduct a literature review on latest studies in this paper. We begin with introducing the background knowledge on this field. Next, to be understandable, we decompose the NPR procedure into a series of modules and explicate various design choices on each module. Furthermore, we identify several challenges and discuss the effect of existing solutions. Finally, we conclude and provide some promising directions for future research.