Improved IR-based Bug Localization with Intelligent Relevance Feedback
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866915217366056960 |
|---|---|
| author | Samir, Asif Mohammed Rahman, Mohammad Masudur |
| author_facet | Samir, Asif Mohammed Rahman, Mohammad Masudur |
| contents | Software bugs pose a significant challenge during development and maintenance, and practitioners spend nearly 50% of their time dealing with bugs. Many existing techniques adopt Information Retrieval (IR) to localize a reported bug using textual and semantic relevance between bug reports and source code. However, they often struggle to bridge a critical gap between bug reports and code that requires in-depth contextual understanding, which goes beyond textual or semantic relevance. In this paper, we present a novel technique for bug localization - BRaIn - that addresses the contextual gaps by assessing the relevance between bug reports and code with Large Language Models (LLM). It then leverages the LLM's feedback (a.k.a., Intelligent Relevance Feedback) to reformulate queries and re-rank source documents, improving bug localization. We evaluate BRaIn using a benchmark dataset, Bench4BL, and three performance metrics and compare it against six baseline techniques from the literature. Our experimental results show that BRaIn outperforms baselines by 87.6%, 89.5%, and 48.8% margins in MAP, MRR, and HIT@K, respectively. Additionally, it can localize approximately 52% of bugs that cannot be localized by the baseline techniques due to the poor quality of corresponding bug reports. By addressing the contextual gaps and introducing Intelligent Relevance Feedback, BRaIn advances not only theory but also improves IR-based bug localization. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10542 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Improved IR-based Bug Localization with Intelligent Relevance Feedback Samir, Asif Mohammed Rahman, Mohammad Masudur Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language F.2.2; I.2.7 Software bugs pose a significant challenge during development and maintenance, and practitioners spend nearly 50% of their time dealing with bugs. Many existing techniques adopt Information Retrieval (IR) to localize a reported bug using textual and semantic relevance between bug reports and source code. However, they often struggle to bridge a critical gap between bug reports and code that requires in-depth contextual understanding, which goes beyond textual or semantic relevance. In this paper, we present a novel technique for bug localization - BRaIn - that addresses the contextual gaps by assessing the relevance between bug reports and code with Large Language Models (LLM). It then leverages the LLM's feedback (a.k.a., Intelligent Relevance Feedback) to reformulate queries and re-rank source documents, improving bug localization. We evaluate BRaIn using a benchmark dataset, Bench4BL, and three performance metrics and compare it against six baseline techniques from the literature. Our experimental results show that BRaIn outperforms baselines by 87.6%, 89.5%, and 48.8% margins in MAP, MRR, and HIT@K, respectively. Additionally, it can localize approximately 52% of bugs that cannot be localized by the baseline techniques due to the poor quality of corresponding bug reports. By addressing the contextual gaps and introducing Intelligent Relevance Feedback, BRaIn advances not only theory but also improves IR-based bug localization. |
| title | Improved IR-based Bug Localization with Intelligent Relevance Feedback |
| topic | Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language F.2.2; I.2.7 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10542 |