ICST 2026
Mon 18 - Fri 22 May 2026 Daejeon, South Korea
Tue 19 May 2026 16:25 - 16:50 at Room 103 - Machine Learning for Code Analysis & Review Chair(s): Dietmar Pfahl

Fault localization (FL) aims to identify buggy program elements that are responsible for observed failures. To reduce the time and effort developers spend on debugging, numerous automated FL techniques have been proposed. Statisticbased FL (STBFL) techniques mainly analyze the test coverage information to prioritize potentially faulty elements. While effective, they require many test cases, mutation data, or other auxiliary artifacts, which are often difficult or costly to obtain. Recently, with the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), many LLM-based FL techniques have been proposed. LLM-based FL offers high practicality because it requires only a few failing tests as its artifacts, but they rely on commercial LLMs, which raise code security concerns or incur substantial infrastructure costs. In this paper, we present MixFL, a methodlevel FL framework enabled by the combination of language models for code (CodeLMs) that are lightweight and specialized for code-related tasks. MixFL allows multiple CodeLMs to embed the source code and comments of methods covered by failing tests, and employs a gating network to adaptively mix their embeddings before computing suspiciousness scores with a deep neural classifier. Due to its design, MixFL can perform effective FL using lightweight CodeLMs that can be deployed on modest infrastructure. On the Defects4J benchmark, which consists of 395 bugs from six real-world Java projects, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into how different combinations of CodeLMs affect FL performance and derive several meaningful findings. In addition, we show that MixFL can outperform the state-of-the-art STBFL and LLM-based FL approaches.

Tue 19 May

Displayed time zone: Seoul change

16:00 - 17:30
Machine Learning for Code Analysis & ReviewResearch Papers / Industry at Room 103
Chair(s): Dietmar Pfahl University of Tartu
16:00
25m
Talk
Understanding and Improving ML-based Static Analysis Result Classification via Explainable AI
Research Papers
Sai Yerramreddy University of Maryland, Mohammad Rafieian The University of Texas at Dallas, Shiyi Wei University of Texas at Dallas, Adam Porter University of Maryland, College Park
16:25
25m
Talk
Adaptive Mixing of Embeddings from Multiple Code Language Models for Fault Localization
Research Papers
Juyoung Yang Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Eunchan Park Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), In-Young Ko Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
16:50
25m
Talk
Assessing the Impact of Code Changes on the Fault Localizability of Large Language ModelsArtifact ReviewedArtifact Available
Research Papers
Sabaat Haroon Virginia tech, Ahmand Faraz Khan Virginia Tech, Ahmad Humayun Virginia Tech, Waris Gill Virginia Tech, Abdul Haddi Amjad Palo Alto Networks, Ali R. Butt Virginia Tech, Mohammad Taha Khan Carnegie Mellon University, Muhammad Ali Gulzar Virginia Tech
17:15
15m
Talk
When Less Is More: Monolingual Fine-Tuning of Language Models for Industrial C# Code Review
Industry
Igli Begolli Technical University Dortmund, Lovion GmbH, Meltem Aksoy TU Dortmund University, Daniel Neider Technical University of Dortmund, Germany