Overfitting in semantics-based automated program repair

Abstract

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 ..