From Guessing to Seeing: Enhancing LLM-Based Program Repair via Trace-Guided Multi-strategy Debate

Abstract

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to resolve software bugs without human intervention, but complex logic errors and silent failures remain challenging. Existing LLM-based APR methods mainly rely on source code and coarse test feedback, making it difficult to capture runtime behaviors and dynamic data dependencies. Execution traces expose concrete state transitions, yet a single LLM interpreting them in isolation may commit to an incorrect repair hypothesis and produce test-overfitting patches. We therefore treat runtime evidence as shared constraints for validating repair hypotheses rather than merely as additional prompt context. We propose TraceRepair, a multi-agent framework in which a Probe Agent captures execution snapshots of critical variables, while specialized repair agents generate, compare, and iteratively refine candidate patches against the observed runtime evidence. A Judge Agent then arbitrates the remaining hypotheses and synthesizes the final patch. Evaluated on Defects4J, TraceRepair correctly fixes 392 defects and outperforms existing LLM-based approaches. Further experiments demonstrate improved efficiency and strong generalization on a newly constructed dataset of recent bugs, suggesting that the gains arise from dynamic reasoning rather than memorization.