Detecting Incorrect LLM Explanations for Automated Program Repair

Abstract

LLM-generated explanations help developers understand automated program repair (APR) rationale and assess patch quality. Incorrect explanations can mislead developers about a repair's reliability, making their detection important. However, manually inspecting the growing volume of generated repairs is impractical, motivating automated detection. Existing methods mainly target incorrect answers from general question-answering LLMs, often by sampling multiple responses and detecting contradictions. Applied to APR, they face two limitations: (1) they may depend on external verifiers that are unavailable or lack APR-specific reasoning; and (2) sampling strategies such as paraphrasing or re-prompting the same input often yield superficial, redundant responses that repeat the original error rather than expose it. We propose MetaReJ, the first method designed to detect incorrect APR explanations using metamorphic testing. Inspired by debate and viva examinations, MetaReJ challenges explanations through an argumentative strategy without requiring external verifiers. It applies novel metamorphic relations (MRs) to recursively question the LLM under equivalent and non-equivalent repair scenarios and detect contradictions. To obtain diverse samples, MetaReJ transforms the buggy program into variants that preserve or alter the underlying bug, then asks the LLM how to repair each variant. Contradictions among responses are encoded as MR violations, which indicate that the original explanation is incorrect. We evaluate MetaReJ on a manually labelled dataset of 1,756 explanations from multiple LLM-based APR systems. MetaReJ achieves an MCC of up to 0.43, outperforming prior methods by up to 333.3% in MCC.