Dynamic Cogeneration of Bug Reproduction Test in Agentic Program Repair

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng, Runxiang, Tufano, Michele, Cambronero, José, Wei, Renyao, Shi, Sherry, Uy, Grant, Rondon, Pat, Ivančić, Franjo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915900670607360
author Cheng, Runxiang
Tufano, Michele
Cambronero, José
Wei, Renyao
Shi, Sherry
Uy, Grant
Rondon, Pat
Ivančić, Franjo
author_facet Cheng, Runxiang
Tufano, Michele
Cambronero, José
Wei, Renyao
Shi, Sherry
Uy, Grant
Rondon, Pat
Ivančić, Franjo
contents Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating promising fixes and aiding fix generation. In practice, when developers submit a patch, they often implement the BRT alongside the fix. Our experience deploying agentic APR reveals that developers similarly desire a BRT within AI-generated patches to increase their confidence. However, canonical APR systems tend to generate BRTs and fixes separately, and focus on producing only the fix in the final patch. In this paper, we study agentic APR in the context of cogeneration, where the APR agent is instructed to generate both a fix and a BRT in the same patch. We evaluate the effectiveness of different cogeneration strategies on 120 human-reported bugs at Google and characterize different cogeneration strategies by their influence on APR agent behavior. We develop and evaluate patch selectors that account for test change information to select patches with plausible fixes (and plausible BRTs). Finally, we analyze the root causes of failed cogeneration trajectories. Importantly, we show that cogeneration allows the APR agent to generate BRTs for at least as many bugs as a dedicated BRT agent, without compromising the generation rate of plausible fixes, thereby reducing engineering effort in maintaining and coordinating separate generation pipelines for fix and BRT at scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Cogeneration of Bug Reproduction Test in Agentic Program Repair
Cheng, Runxiang
Tufano, Michele
Cambronero, José
Wei, Renyao
Shi, Sherry
Uy, Grant
Rondon, Pat
Ivančić, Franjo
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating promising fixes and aiding fix generation. In practice, when developers submit a patch, they often implement the BRT alongside the fix. Our experience deploying agentic APR reveals that developers similarly desire a BRT within AI-generated patches to increase their confidence. However, canonical APR systems tend to generate BRTs and fixes separately, and focus on producing only the fix in the final patch. In this paper, we study agentic APR in the context of cogeneration, where the APR agent is instructed to generate both a fix and a BRT in the same patch. We evaluate the effectiveness of different cogeneration strategies on 120 human-reported bugs at Google and characterize different cogeneration strategies by their influence on APR agent behavior. We develop and evaluate patch selectors that account for test change information to select patches with plausible fixes (and plausible BRTs). Finally, we analyze the root causes of failed cogeneration trajectories. Importantly, we show that cogeneration allows the APR agent to generate BRTs for at least as many bugs as a dedicated BRT agent, without compromising the generation rate of plausible fixes, thereby reducing engineering effort in maintaining and coordinating separate generation pipelines for fix and BRT at scale.
title Dynamic Cogeneration of Bug Reproduction Test in Agentic Program Repair
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19066