Neural Program Repair with Program Dependence Analysis and Effective Filter Mechanism

Abstract

Automated program repair is a crucial task for improving the efficiency of software developers. Recently, neural-based techniques have demonstrated significant promise in generating correct patches for buggy code snippets. However, most existing approaches arbitrarily treat the buggy context without any analysis to capture the semantic relationship between the buggy statement and its context. Additionally, we observe that existing neural models may output an unaltered patch consistent with the input buggy code snippet, which fails to be the correct human-written one for fixing the given bug. To address the aforementioned limitations, we present in this paper a novel neural program repair framework called \approach, which adapts the general pre-trained language model for fixing single-line Java bugs. We make the first attempt to use program slicing to extract contextual information directly related to the given buggy statement as repair ingredients from the corresponding program dependence graph and eliminate unaltered patches using an intuitive but effective filter mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of \approach on five benchmarks when compared with state-of-the-art baselines.