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Tue 29 Apr 2025 15:10 - 15:30 at 210 - APR Session 3 Chair(s): Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Chao Peng

utomated Program Repair (APR) can assist developers by automatically generating patches for buggy code. However, as recent techniques leverage deep learning models, developers do not know why the model generated a particular patch. Existing Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as SHAP, can be applied to APR, however, their complexity raises questions about whether developers find such explanations understandable. In this work, we develop a novel framework SCHOLIA, with two extensions to feature attribution methods to make them more understandable to the developers. First generates a text explanation based on attribution scores. Second creates a visualization capturing the transformation of the patch based on the impact of code tokens, named patch transformation.

We evaluated the proposed new two explanations types compared to SHAP, using a user survey. The survey received responses from 106 participants. Accordingly, 68.9% (P $<$ .05) and 64.2% (P $<$ .05) of participants agreed that text explanation and patch transformation methods are easy to understand, while only 17.9% (P $<$ .05) agreed with the original SHAP explanation. The survey responses indicate, with statistical significance, that our extensions to SHAP are easier to understand than the original SHAP explanations.

Tue 29 Apr

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

14:00 - 15:30
APR Session 3APR at 210
Chair(s): Tegawendé F. Bissyandé University of Luxembourg, Chao Peng ByteDance
14:00
30m
Other
Discussion
APR
Chao Peng ByteDance
14:30
20m
Talk
Bogus Bugs, Duplicates, and Revealing Comments: Data Quality Issues in NPR
APR
Julian Prenner Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Romain Robbes CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux
14:50
20m
Talk
LLM-Based Repair of C++ Implicit Data Loss Compiler Warnings: An Industrial Case Study
APR
Chansong You SAP Labs Korea, Hyun Deok Choi SAP Labs Korea, Jingun Hong SAP Labs Korea
15:10
20m
Talk
Scholia - An XAI Framework for APR
APR
Nethum Lamahewage University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, Nimantha Cooray University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, Ridwan Salihin Shariffdeen National University of Singapore, Sandareka Wickramanayake University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, Nisansa de Silva University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
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