ARFT-Transformer: Modeling Metric Dependencies for Cross-Project Aging-Related Bug Prediction

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Hauptverfasser: Ge, Shuning, Qin, Fangyun, Wan, Xiaohui, Liu, Yang, Dai, Qian, Zheng, Zheng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Ge, Shuning
Qin, Fangyun
Wan, Xiaohui
Liu, Yang
Dai, Qian
Zheng, Zheng
author_facet Ge, Shuning
Qin, Fangyun
Wan, Xiaohui
Liu, Yang
Dai, Qian
Zheng, Zheng
contents Software systems that run for long periods often suffer from software aging, which is typically caused by Aging-Related Bugs (ARBs). To mitigate the risk of ARBs early in the development phase, ARB prediction has been introduced into software aging research. However, due to the difficulty of collecting ARBs, within-project ARB prediction faces the challenge of data scarcity, leading to the proposal of cross-project ARB prediction. This task faces two major challenges: 1) domain adaptation issue caused by distribution difference between source and target projects; and 2) severe class imbalance between ARB-prone and ARB-free samples. Although various methods have been proposed for cross-project ARB prediction, existing approaches treat the input metrics independently and often neglect the rich inter-metric dependencies, which can lead to overlapping information and misjudgment of metric importance, potentially affecting the model's performance. Moreover, they typically use cross-entropy as the loss function during training, which cannot distinguish the difficulty of sample classification. To overcome these limitations, we propose ARFT-Transformer, a transformer-based cross-project ARB prediction framework that introduces a metric-level multi-head attention mechanism to capture metric interactions and incorporates Focal Loss function to effectively handle class imbalance. Experiments conducted on three large-scale open-source projects demonstrate that ARFT-Transformer on average outperforms state-of-the-art cross-project ARB prediction methods in both single-source and multi-source cases, achieving up to a 29.54% and 19.92% improvement in Balance metric.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_14731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ARFT-Transformer: Modeling Metric Dependencies for Cross-Project Aging-Related Bug Prediction
Ge, Shuning
Qin, Fangyun
Wan, Xiaohui
Liu, Yang
Dai, Qian
Zheng, Zheng
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Software systems that run for long periods often suffer from software aging, which is typically caused by Aging-Related Bugs (ARBs). To mitigate the risk of ARBs early in the development phase, ARB prediction has been introduced into software aging research. However, due to the difficulty of collecting ARBs, within-project ARB prediction faces the challenge of data scarcity, leading to the proposal of cross-project ARB prediction. This task faces two major challenges: 1) domain adaptation issue caused by distribution difference between source and target projects; and 2) severe class imbalance between ARB-prone and ARB-free samples. Although various methods have been proposed for cross-project ARB prediction, existing approaches treat the input metrics independently and often neglect the rich inter-metric dependencies, which can lead to overlapping information and misjudgment of metric importance, potentially affecting the model's performance. Moreover, they typically use cross-entropy as the loss function during training, which cannot distinguish the difficulty of sample classification. To overcome these limitations, we propose ARFT-Transformer, a transformer-based cross-project ARB prediction framework that introduces a metric-level multi-head attention mechanism to capture metric interactions and incorporates Focal Loss function to effectively handle class imbalance. Experiments conducted on three large-scale open-source projects demonstrate that ARFT-Transformer on average outperforms state-of-the-art cross-project ARB prediction methods in both single-source and multi-source cases, achieving up to a 29.54% and 19.92% improvement in Balance metric.
title ARFT-Transformer: Modeling Metric Dependencies for Cross-Project Aging-Related Bug Prediction
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14731