Overfitting in Semantics-based Automated Program Repair
The primary goal of Automated Program Repair (APR) is to automatically fix buggy software, to reduce the manual bug-fix burden that presently rests on human developers. Existing APR techniques can be generally divided into two families: semantics- vs. heuristics-based. Semantics-based APR uses symbolic execution and test suites to extract semantic constraints, and uses program synthesis to synthesize repairs that satisfy the extracted constraints. Heuristic-based APR generates large populations of repair candidates via source manipulation, and searches for the best among them. Both families largely rely on a primary assumption that a program is correctly patched if the generated patch leads the program to pass all provided test cases. Patch correctness is thus an especially pressing concern. A repair technique may generate overfitting patches, which lead a program to pass all existing test cases, but fails to generalize beyond them. In this work, we revisit the overfitting problem with a focus on semantics-based APR techniques, complementing previous studies of the overfitting problem in heuristics-based APR. We perform our study using IntroClass and Codeflaws benchmarks, two datasets well-suited for assessing repair quality, to systematically characterize and understand the nature of overfitting in semantics-based APR. We find that similar to heuristics-based APR, overfitting also occurs in semantics-based APR in various different ways.
Wed 30 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
14:00 - 15:30 | Software Repair IITechnical Papers / Journal first papers at H1 room Chair(s): Alessandro Orso Georgia Tech | ||
14:00 20mTalk | Semantic Program Repair Using a Reference Implementation Technical Papers Sergey Mechtaev National University of Singapore, Manh-Dung Nguyen , Yannic Noller Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Lars Grunske Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Abhik Roychoudhury National University of Singapore File Attached | ||
14:20 20mTalk | Automated Repair of Mobile Friendly Problems in Web Pages Technical Papers Sonal Mahajan University of Southern California, USA, Negarsadat Abolhassani , Phil McMinn University of Sheffield, William G.J. Halfond University of Southern California | ||
14:40 20mTalk | Static Automated Program Repair for Heap Properties Technical Papers Pre-print File Attached | ||
15:00 20mTalk | Overfitting in Semantics-based Automated Program Repair Journal first papers Xuan-Bach D. Le Singapore Management University, Singapore, Ferdian Thung , David Lo Singapore Management University, Claire Le Goues Carnegie Mellon University Pre-print | ||
15:20 10mTalk | Q&A in groups Technical Papers |