ICPC 2026
Sun 12 - Mon 13 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relevant in Software Engineering research and practice, with Automated Bug Fixing (ABF) being one of their key applications. ABF involves transforming a buggy method into its fixed equivalent. In this study, we investigate how the presence or absence of comments, both during training and at inference time, impacts the bug-fixing capabilities of LLMs. We conduct an empirical evaluation comparing two model families, each evaluated under all combinations of training and inference conditions (with and without comments), and thereby revisiting the common practice of removing comments during training. To address the limited availability of comments in state-of-the-art datasets, we use an LLM to automatically generate comments for methods lacking them. Our findings show that comments improve ABF accuracy by up to threefold when present in both phases, while training with comments does not degrade performance when instances lack them.

Mon 13 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

11:00 - 12:30
Session 5 - Summarization, Documentation, and Code ReviewResearch Track / Vaclav Rajlich Early Career Award / ICPC Program / Journal First at Europa II
Chair(s): Masud Rahman Dalhousie University
11:00
10m
Talk
Vaclav Rajlich Award
Vaclav Rajlich Early Career Award
Marvin Wyrich Saarland University
11:10
10m
Talk
RepoMind: Enhancing Repository-Level Code Generation via LLM Reasoning over Structured Repository Documentation
Research Track
Songwen Gong South China University of Technology, Mengzhen Wang South China University of Technology, Jiexin Wang South China University of Technology, Yi Cai School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
11:20
10m
Talk
SQL-Commenter: Aligning Large Language Models for SQL Comment Generation with Direct Preference Optimization
Research Track
Lei Yu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Peng Wang Institute of Information Engineering,Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingyuan Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Xin Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jia Xu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Li Yang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changzhi Deng Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiajia Ma Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Fengjun Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
11:30
10m
Talk
Studying Quality Improvements Recommended via Manual and Automated Code Review
Research Track
Giuseppe Crupi Università della Svizzera italiana, Rosalia Tufano Università della Svizzera Italiana, Gabriele Bavota Software Institute @ Università della Svizzera Italiana
Pre-print
11:40
10m
Talk
Towards Universal Segmentation for Log Parsing
Research Track
Van-Hoang Le University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Domenico Bianculli University of Luxembourg, Huy-Trung Nguyen Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology
Pre-print
11:50
10m
Talk
DPS: Design Pattern Summarisation Using Code Features
Journal First
Najam Nazar Monash University, Sameer Sikka University of Melbourne, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University
12:00
10m
Talk
On the Impact of Code Comments for Automated Bug-Fixing: An Empirical Study
Research Track
Antonio Vitale Politecnico di Torino, University of Molise, Emanuela Guglielmi University of Molise, Simone Scalabrino University of Molise, Rocco Oliveto University of Molise
Pre-print
12:10
20m
Live Q&A
Joint QA and Discussion
ICPC Program