Adapting Knowledge Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Automated Program Repair

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Hauptverfasser: Cai, Xuemeng, Jiang, Lingxiao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cai, Xuemeng
Jiang, Lingxiao
author_facet Cai, Xuemeng
Jiang, Lingxiao
contents Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to enhance software reliability by automatically generating bug-fixing patches. Recent work has improved the state-of-the-art of APR by fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs), such as CodeT5, for APR. However, the effectiveness of fine-tuning becomes weakened in data scarcity scenarios, and data scarcity can be a common issue in practice, limiting fine-tuning performance. To alleviate this limitation, this paper adapts prompt tuning for enhanced APR and conducts a comprehensive study to evaluate its effectiveness in data scarcity scenarios, using three LLMs of different sizes and six diverse datasets across four programming languages. Prompt tuning rewrites the input to a model by adding extra prompt tokens and tunes both the model and the prompts on a small dataset. These tokens provide task-specific knowledge that can improve the model for APR, which is especially critical in data scarcity scenarios. Moreover, domain knowledge has proven crucial in many code intelligence tasks, but existing studies fail to leverage domain knowledge during the prompt tuning for APR. To close this gap, we introduce knowledge prompt tuning, an approach that adapts prompt tuning with six distinct types of code- or bug-related domain knowledge for APR. Our work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to adapt and evaluate prompt tuning and the effectiveness of code- or bug-related domain knowledge for APR, particularly under data scarcity settings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that prompt tuning with knowledge generally outperforms fine-tuning under various experimental settings, achieving an average improvement of 87.33% over fine-tuning in data scarcity scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_01523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Knowledge Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Automated Program Repair
Cai, Xuemeng
Jiang, Lingxiao
Software Engineering
Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to enhance software reliability by automatically generating bug-fixing patches. Recent work has improved the state-of-the-art of APR by fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs), such as CodeT5, for APR. However, the effectiveness of fine-tuning becomes weakened in data scarcity scenarios, and data scarcity can be a common issue in practice, limiting fine-tuning performance. To alleviate this limitation, this paper adapts prompt tuning for enhanced APR and conducts a comprehensive study to evaluate its effectiveness in data scarcity scenarios, using three LLMs of different sizes and six diverse datasets across four programming languages. Prompt tuning rewrites the input to a model by adding extra prompt tokens and tunes both the model and the prompts on a small dataset. These tokens provide task-specific knowledge that can improve the model for APR, which is especially critical in data scarcity scenarios. Moreover, domain knowledge has proven crucial in many code intelligence tasks, but existing studies fail to leverage domain knowledge during the prompt tuning for APR. To close this gap, we introduce knowledge prompt tuning, an approach that adapts prompt tuning with six distinct types of code- or bug-related domain knowledge for APR. Our work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to adapt and evaluate prompt tuning and the effectiveness of code- or bug-related domain knowledge for APR, particularly under data scarcity settings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that prompt tuning with knowledge generally outperforms fine-tuning under various experimental settings, achieving an average improvement of 87.33% over fine-tuning in data scarcity scenarios.
title Adapting Knowledge Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Automated Program Repair
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01523