Loading [MathJax]/extensions/MathMenu.js
Semantic Program Repair Using a Reference Implementation | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Semantic Program Repair Using a Reference Implementation


Abstract:

Automated program repair has been studied via the use of techniques involving search, semantic analysis and artificial intelligence. Most of these techniques rely on test...Show More

Abstract:

Automated program repair has been studied via the use of techniques involving search, semantic analysis and artificial intelligence. Most of these techniques rely on tests as the correctness criteria, which causes the test overfitting problem. Although various approaches such as learning from code corpus have been proposed to address this problem, they are unable to guarantee that the generated patches generalize beyond the given tests. This work studies automated repair of errors using a reference implementation. The reference implementation is symbolically analyzed to automatically infer a specification of the intended behavior. This specification is then used to synthesize a patch that enforces conditional equivalence of the patched and the reference programs. The use of the reference implementation as an implicit correctness criterion alleviates overfitting in test-based repair. Besides, since we generate patches by semantic analysis, the reference program may have a substantially different implementation from the patched program, which distinguishes our approach from existing techniques for regression repair like Relifix. Our experiments in repairing the embedded Linux Busybox with GNU Coreutils as reference (and vice-versa) revealed that the proposed approach scales to real-world programs and enables the generation of more correct patches.
Date of Conference: 27 May 2018 - 03 June 2018
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 02 September 2018
ISBN Information:
Electronic ISSN: 1558-1225
Conference Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

References

References is not available for this document.