Boosting Open-Source LLMs for Program Repair via Reasoning Transfer and LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908393179971584 |
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| author | Tang, Xunzhu Klein, Jacques Bissyandé, Tegawendé F. |
| author_facet | Tang, Xunzhu Klein, Jacques Bissyandé, Tegawendé F. |
| contents | Several closed-source LLMs have consistently outperformed open-source alternatives in program repair tasks, primarily due to their superior reasoning capabilities and extensive pre-training. This paper introduces Repairity, a novel three-stage methodology that significantly narrows this performance gap through reasoning extraction and reinforcement learning. Our approach: (1) systematically filters high-quality reasoning traces from closed-source models using correctness verification, (2) transfers this reasoning knowledge to open-source models via supervised fine-tuning, and (3) develops reinforcement learning with LLM-based feedback to further optimize performance. Empirical evaluation across multiple program repair benchmarks demonstrates that Repairity improves the performance of Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, a base open source LLM, by 8.68\% on average, reducing the capability gap with Claude-Sonnet3.7, a state-of-the-art closed-source model, from 10.05% to 1.35%. Ablation studies confirm that both reasoning extraction and LLM-guided reinforcement learning contribute significantly to these improvements. Our methodology generalizes effectively to additional code-related tasks, enabling organizations to leverage high-quality program repair capabilities while maintaining the customizability, transparency, and deployment flexibility inherent to open-source models. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03921 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Boosting Open-Source LLMs for Program Repair via Reasoning Transfer and LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning Tang, Xunzhu Klein, Jacques Bissyandé, Tegawendé F. Software Engineering Several closed-source LLMs have consistently outperformed open-source alternatives in program repair tasks, primarily due to their superior reasoning capabilities and extensive pre-training. This paper introduces Repairity, a novel three-stage methodology that significantly narrows this performance gap through reasoning extraction and reinforcement learning. Our approach: (1) systematically filters high-quality reasoning traces from closed-source models using correctness verification, (2) transfers this reasoning knowledge to open-source models via supervised fine-tuning, and (3) develops reinforcement learning with LLM-based feedback to further optimize performance. Empirical evaluation across multiple program repair benchmarks demonstrates that Repairity improves the performance of Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, a base open source LLM, by 8.68\% on average, reducing the capability gap with Claude-Sonnet3.7, a state-of-the-art closed-source model, from 10.05% to 1.35%. Ablation studies confirm that both reasoning extraction and LLM-guided reinforcement learning contribute significantly to these improvements. Our methodology generalizes effectively to additional code-related tasks, enabling organizations to leverage high-quality program repair capabilities while maintaining the customizability, transparency, and deployment flexibility inherent to open-source models. |
| title | Boosting Open-Source LLMs for Program Repair via Reasoning Transfer and LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03921 |