Stack Trace-Based Crash Deduplication with Transformer Adaptation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mamun, Md Afif Al, Uddin, Gias, Xia, Lan, Zhang, Longyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mamun, Md Afif Al
Uddin, Gias
Xia, Lan
Zhang, Longyu
author_facet Mamun, Md Afif Al
Uddin, Gias
Xia, Lan
Zhang, Longyu
contents Automated crash reporting systems generate large volumes of duplicate reports, overwhelming issue-tracking systems and increasing developer workload. Traditional stack trace-based deduplication methods, relying on string similarity, rule-based heuristics, or deep learning (DL) models, often fail to capture the contextual and structural relationships within stack traces. We propose dedupT, a transformer-based approach that models stack traces holistically rather than as isolated frames. dedupT first adapts a pretrained language model (PLM) to stack traces, then uses its embeddings to train a fully-connected network (FCN) to rank duplicate crashes effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that dedupT outperforms existing DL and traditional methods (e.g., sequence alignment and information retrieval techniques) in both duplicate ranking and unique crash detection, significantly reducing manual triage effort. On four public datasets, dedupT improves Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) often by over 15% compared to the best DL baseline and up to 9% over traditional methods while achieving higher Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC) in detecting unique crash reports. Our work advances the integration of modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques into software engineering, providing an effective solution for stack trace-based crash deduplication.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19449
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stack Trace-Based Crash Deduplication with Transformer Adaptation
Mamun, Md Afif Al
Uddin, Gias
Xia, Lan
Zhang, Longyu
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Automated crash reporting systems generate large volumes of duplicate reports, overwhelming issue-tracking systems and increasing developer workload. Traditional stack trace-based deduplication methods, relying on string similarity, rule-based heuristics, or deep learning (DL) models, often fail to capture the contextual and structural relationships within stack traces. We propose dedupT, a transformer-based approach that models stack traces holistically rather than as isolated frames. dedupT first adapts a pretrained language model (PLM) to stack traces, then uses its embeddings to train a fully-connected network (FCN) to rank duplicate crashes effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that dedupT outperforms existing DL and traditional methods (e.g., sequence alignment and information retrieval techniques) in both duplicate ranking and unique crash detection, significantly reducing manual triage effort. On four public datasets, dedupT improves Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) often by over 15% compared to the best DL baseline and up to 9% over traditional methods while achieving higher Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC) in detecting unique crash reports. Our work advances the integration of modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques into software engineering, providing an effective solution for stack trace-based crash deduplication.
title Stack Trace-Based Crash Deduplication with Transformer Adaptation
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19449