FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada
Tue 7 Jul 2026 11:50 - 12:10 at MB 3.430 - Bug Detection and Localization Chair(s): Tarannum Shaila Zaman

Deep Learning (DL) applications have become essential in numerous domains, yet they remain plagued by subtle bugs that cause 66% of crashes in production systems. These failures primarily stem from API usage violations in complex frameworks like TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch, where APIs lack formal specifications and interdependencies between operations remain undocumented. Traditional static analysis tools fail to address DL-specific constraints, such as data dependency between layers. To bridge this critical gap, we propose NEURALSTATE, an approach to detect performance and program crash bugs in a DL program. NEURALSTATE follows a four-step process: (i) gather specifications for Deep Learning operations from different sources; (ii) introduce abstract states to represent these Deep Learning operations; (iii) design formal rules for transitioning between states based on the specifications; (iv) utilize a combination of standard analysis techniques (i.e., typestate and value propagation) to identify bugs in a DL program. Our evaluation on real-world benchmarks demonstrates NEURALSTATE’s effectiveness, achieving a 25% improvement in precision and 63% improvement in recall compared to state-of-the-art tools. Most importantly, NEURALSTATE successfully detects 18 subtle bugs in 45 real-world programs that existing techniques miss entirely.

Tue 7 Jul

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:30
Bug Detection and LocalizationIndustry Papers / Journal-First Paper / Research Papers at MB 3.430
Chair(s): Tarannum Shaila Zaman University of Kentucky
11:00
20m
Talk
GraphLocator: Graph-guided Causal Reasoning for Issue Localization
Research Papers
Wei Liu Peking University, Chao Peng Tencent, Pengfei Gao ByteDance, Aofan Liu Peking University, Wei Zhang Peking University, Haiyan Zhao Peking University, Zhi Jin Peking University, Wuhan University
11:20
20m
Talk
Reflex: Event-Driven Automated Fault Localization for Large-Scale LLM Training
Industry Papers
Hua Ding Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yun Zhang ByteDance Seed, Bo Zhang China Electric Power Research Institute, Wenxiao Wang ByteDance Seed, Libo Chen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Huan Yu ByteDance Seed, Zhe Nan ByteDance Seed, Zuquan Song ByteDance Seed, Weiqiang Lou ByteDance Seed, Gaohong Liu ByteDance Seed, Xi Yang ByteDance Seed, Yuhan Li ByteDance Seed, Qinlong Wang ByteDance Seed, Shuguang Wang ByteDance Seed, Wencong Xiao ByteDance Seed, Shenghong Li Shanghai Jiao Tong University
11:40
10m
Talk
How Far Can VLMs Go for Visual Bug Detection? Studying 19,738 Keyframes from 41 Hours of Gameplay Videos
Industry Papers
Wentao Lu University of Alberta, Alexander Senchenko Electronic Arts, Alan Sayle Electronic Arts, Abram Hindle University of Alberta, Cor-Paul Bezemer University of Alberta
11:50
20m
Talk
Typestate-based Fault Localization of API Usage Violations in a Deep Learning Program
Journal-First Paper
Fraol Batole Tulane University, Ruchira Manke Tulane University, Robert Dyer University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas, Hridesh Rajan Tulane University