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

Software bugs cost companies billions annually and cause developers to spend roughly 50% of their time on bug resolution. Traditional methods for bug localization often analyze the suspiciousness of code components (e.g., methods, documents) in isolation, overlooking their connections with other components in the codebase. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI techniques have shown strong potential for code understanding, but still lack causal reasoning during code exploration and struggle to manage growing context effectively, limiting their capability. In this paper, we present a novel agentic technique for bug localization –CogniGent– that overcomes the limitations above by leveraging multiple AI agents capable of causal reasoning, call-graph-based root cause analysis and context engineering. It emulates developers-inspired debugging practices (a.k.a., dynamic cognitive debugging) and conducts hypothesis testing to support bug localization. We evaluate CogniGent on a curated dataset of 591 bug reports using three widely adopted performance metrics and compare it against five established baselines from the literature. Experimental results show that our technique consistently outperformed existing traditional and LLM-based techniques, achieving MAP improvements of 23.33-38.57% at the document and method levels. Similar gains were observed in MRR, with increases of 25.14-53.74% at both granularity levels. Statistical significance tests also confirm the superiority of our technique. By addressing the reasoning, dependency, and context limitations, CogniGent advances the state of bug localization, bridging human-like cognition with agentic automation for improved performance.

Mon 13 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

16:00 - 18:00
Session 7 - LLM-Based Agents for Software Engineering TasksJournal First / Replications and Negative Results (RENE) / Research Track / ICPC Program at Europa II
Chair(s): Wesley K.G. Assunção North Carolina State University, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan
16:00
10m
Talk
LLMs for Qualitative Data Analysis Fail on Security-specific Comments in Human Experiments
Replications and Negative Results (RENE)
Maria Camporese University of Trento, Fabio Massacci University of Trento; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Yuanjun Gong University of Trento
Pre-print File Attached
16:10
10m
Talk
Do comments and expertise still matter? An experiment on programmers’ adoption of AI-generated JavaScript code
Journal First
Changwen LI , Christoph Treude Singapore Management University, Ofir Turel The University of Melbourne
16:20
10m
Talk
Reducing Token Usage of State-in-Context Agents using Minification
Replications and Negative Results (RENE)
Nicolas Hrubec TU Wien, Jürgen Cito TU Wien
16:30
10m
Talk
Agile Story-Point Estimation: Is RAG a Better Way to Go?
Replications and Negative Results (RENE)
Lamyea Maha University of Saskatchewan, Tajmilur Rahman Gannon University, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan
DOI Pre-print
16:40
10m
Talk
Improved Bug Localization with AI Agents Leveraging Hypothesis and Dynamic Cognition
Research Track
Asif Mohammed Samir Dalhousie University, Masud Rahman Dalhousie University
Pre-print Media Attached
16:50
10m
Talk
Code Ranking with Human-Inspired Agent-Based Framework
Research Track
Liuwen Cao South China University of Technology, liang jiaxi , Jiexin Wang South China University of Technology, Yi Cai School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
17:00
20m
Live Q&A
Joint QA and Discussion
ICPC Program

17:20
40m
Awards
ICPC Awards and Closing Session
ICPC Program