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Computer Science > Programming Languages

arXiv:2505.17703 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 May 2025]

Title:Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing Bugs in Continuous
Program Spaces

Authors:Andre Silva, Gustav Thoren, Martin Monperrus
View a PDF of the paper titled Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing
Bugs in Continuous Program Spaces, by Andr\'e Silva and 2 other
authors
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    Abstract:Automatic program repair seeks to generate correct code
    from buggy programs, with most approaches searching the correct
    program in a discrete, symbolic space of source code tokens. This
    symbolic search is fundamentally limited by its inability to
    directly reason about program behavior. We introduce
    Gradient-Based Program Repair (GBPR), a new paradigm that
    reframes program repair as continuous optimization in a
    differentiable numerical program space. Our core insight is to
    compile symbolic programs into differentiable numerical
    representations, enabling search in the numerical program space
    directly guided by program behavior. To evaluate GBPR, we present
    RaspBugs, a new benchmark of 1,466 buggy symbolic RASP programs
    and their respective numerical representations. Our experiments
    demonstrate that GBPR can effectively repair buggy symbolic
    programs by gradient-based optimization in the numerical program
    space, with convincing repair trajectories. To our knowledge, we
    are the first to state program repair as continuous optimization
    in a numerical program space. Our work establishes a new
    direction for program repair research, bridging two rich worlds:
    continuous optimization and program behavior.

Subjects: Programming Languages (cs.PL); Machine Learning (cs.LG);
          Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as:  arXiv:2505.17703 [cs.PL]
          (or arXiv:2505.17703v1 [cs.PL] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.17703
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Andre Silva [view email]
[v1] Fri, 23 May 2025 10:12:09 UTC (896 KB)
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