SANER 2026
Tue 17 - Fri 20 March 2026 Limassol, Cyprus

Ensuring semantic consistency between source code and its accompanying comments is crucial for program comprehension, effective debugging, and long-term maintainability. Comment inconsistency arises when developers modify code but neglect to update the corresponding comments, potentially misleading future maintainers and introducing errors. Recent approaches to code–comment inconsistency (CCI) detection leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and rely on capturing the semantic relationship between code changes and outdated comments. However, they often ignore the structural complexity of code evolution, including historical change activities, and introduce privacy and resource challenges. In this paper, we propose a Just-In-Time CCI detection approach built upon the CodeT5+ backbone. Our method decomposes code changes into ordered sequences of modification activities such as replacing, deleting, and adding to more effectively capture the causal relationships between these changes and the corresponding outdated comments. Extensive experiments conducted on publicly available benchmark datasets–JITDATA and CCIBENCH–demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art models by up to 13.54% in F1-Score and achieves an improvement ranging from 4.18% to 10.94% over fine-tuned LLMs.

Wed 18 Mar

Displayed time zone: Athens change

11:00 - 12:30
Session 1A - Software Quality, Technical Debt, and Software EvolutionShort Papers and Posters Track / Registered Report Track / Journal First Track / Research Track / Reproducibility Studies and Negative Results (RENE) Track at Panorama
Chair(s): Kilian Müller Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
11:00
15m
Talk
Leveraging Commit-Size Context and Hyper Co-Change Graph Centralities for Defect Prediction
Research Track
Amit Kumar IIIT Allahabad, Hrishikesh Ethari IIIT Manipur, Sonali Agarwal Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad
11:15
15m
Talk
An empirical study on architectural smells through a pipeline for continuous technical debt assessment
Journal First Track
Matteo Bochicchio University of Milano-Bicocca, Darius Sas TXT Arcan, Alessandro Gilardi University of Milano-Bicocca, Francesca Arcelli Fontana University of Milano-Bicocca
11:30
15m
Talk
Binary and multi-class classification of Self-Admitted Technical Debt: How far can we go?
Journal First Track
Francesca Arcelli Fontana University of Milano-Bicocca, Juri Di Rocco University of L'Aquila, Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila, Amleto Di Salle Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila
11:45
15m
Talk
Using Small Language Models to Reverse-Engineer Machine Learning Pipelines Structures
Registered Report Track
Nicolas Lacroix Université Côte d'Azur, I3S, Mireille Blay-Fornarino Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, I3S, Sébastien Mosser McMaster University, Frederic Precioso Laboratoire I3S UMR UNS-CNRS 7271
12:00
15m
Talk
Self-Admitted Technical Debt in LLM Software: An Empirical Comparison with ML and Non-ML Software
Reproducibility Studies and Negative Results (RENE) Track
Niruthiha Selvanayagam Ecole de Technologie Supérieure, Taher A. Ghaleb Trent University, Manel Abdellatif École de Technologie Supérieure
12:15
7m
Talk
Larger Is Not Always Better: Leveraging Code Evolution for Comment Inconsistency Detection
Short Papers and Posters Track
Nguyen Hoang Vinh-Phong Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Anh M. T. Bui Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila
Pre-print
12:22
7m
Talk
Scala Mixed-Paradigm Maintainability Metrics
Short Papers and Posters Track
Ivo Broekhof Universiteit Twente, Rinse van Hees InfoSupport, Nhat University of Twente, Vadim Zaytsev University of Twente
File Attached