arXiv subjects

Chunrong Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Chunrong Fang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Large-scale Empirical Study on Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Unit Testing

Unit testing plays a pivotal role in software development, improving software quality and reliability. However, generating effective test cases manually is time-consuming, prompting interest in unit testing research. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in various unit testing tasks, including test generation, assertion generation, and test evolution, but existing studies are limited in scope and lack a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we present a large-scale empirical study on fine-tuning LLMs for unit testing. Our study involves three unit testing tasks, five benchmarks, eight evaluation metrics, and 37 popular LLMs across various architectures and sizes, consuming over 3,000 NVIDIA A100 GPU hours. We focus on three key research questions: (1) the performance of LLMs compared to state-of-the-art methods, (2) the impact of different factors on LLM performance, and (3) the effectiveness of fine-tuning versus prompt engineering. Our findings reveal that LLMs outperform existing state-of-the-art approaches on all three unit testing tasks across nearly all metrics, highlighting the potential of fine-tuning LLMs in unit testing tasks. Furthermore, large-scale, decoder-only models achieve the best results across tasks, while encoder-decoder models perform better under the same parameter scale. Additionally, the comparison of the performance between fine-tuning and prompt engineering approaches reveals the considerable potential capability of the prompt engineering approach in unit testing tasks. We then discuss the concerned issues on the test generation task, including data leakage issues, bug detection capabilities, and metrics comparisons. Finally, we further pinpoint carious practical guidelines for LLM-based approaches to unit testing tasks in the near future.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

A Prompt Learning Framework for Source Code Summarization

(Source) code summarization is the task of automatically generating natural language summaries (also called comments) for given code snippets. Recently, with the successful application of large language models (LLMs) in numerous fields, software engineering researchers have also attempted to adapt LLMs to solve code summarization tasks. The main adaptation schemes include instruction prompting, task-oriented (full-parameter) fine-tuning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). However, instruction prompting involves designing crafted prompts and requires users to have professional domain knowledge, while task-oriented fine-tuning requires high training costs, and effective, tailored PEFT methods for code summarization are still lacking. This paper proposes an effective prompt learning framework for code summarization called PromptCS. It no longer requires users to rack their brains to design effective prompts. Instead, PromptCS trains a prompt agent that can generate continuous prompts to unleash the potential for LLMs in code summarization. Compared to the human-written discrete prompt, the continuous prompts are produced under the guidance of LLMs and are therefore easier to understand by LLMs. PromptCS is non-invasive to LLMs and freezes the parameters of LLMs when training the prompt agent, which can greatly reduce the requirements for training resources. Our comprehensive experimental results show that PromptCS significantly outperforms instruction prompting schemes (including zero-shot learning and few-shot learning) on all four widely used metrics, and is comparable to the task-oriented fine-tuning scheme. In some base LLMs, e.g., StarCoderBase-1B and -3B, PromptCS even outperforms the task-oriented fine-tuning scheme. More importantly, the training efficiency of PromptCS is faster than the task-oriented fine-tuning scheme, with a more pronounced advantage on larger LLMs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Redefining Crowdsourced Test Report Prioritization: An Innovative Approach with Large Language Model

Context: Crowdsourced testing has gained popularity in software testing, especially for mobile app testing, due to its ability to bring diversity and tackle fragmentation issues. However, the openness of crowdsourced testing presents challenges, particularly in the manual review of numerous test reports, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Objective: The primary goal of this research is to improve the efficiency of review processes in crowdsourced testing. Traditional approaches to test report prioritization lack a deep understanding of semantic information in textual descriptions of these reports. This paper introduces LLMPrior, a novel approach for prioritizing crowdsourced test reports using large language models (LLMs). Method: LLMPrior leverages LLMs for the analysis and clustering of crowdsourced test reports based on the types of bugs revealed in their textual descriptions. This involves using prompt engineering techniques to enhance the performance of LLMs. Following the clustering, a recurrent selection algorithm is applied to prioritize the reports. Results: Empirical experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMPrior. The findings indicate that LLMPrior not only surpasses current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of performance but also proves to be more feasible, efficient, and reliable. This success is attributed to the use of prompt engineering techniques and the cluster-based prioritization strategy. Conclusion: LLMPrior represents a significant advancement in crowdsourced test report prioritization. By effectively utilizing large language models and a cluster-based strategy, it addresses the challenges in traditional prioritization approaches, offering a more efficient and reliable solution for app developers dealing with crowdsourced test reports.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Machine Learning for Actionable Warning Identification: A Comprehensive Survey

Actionable Warning Identification (AWI) plays a crucial role in improving the usability of static code analyzers. With recent advances in Machine Learning (ML), various approaches have been proposed to incorporate ML techniques into AWI. These ML-based AWI approaches, benefiting from ML's strong ability to learn subtle and previously unseen patterns from historical data, have demonstrated superior performance. However, a comprehensive overview of these approaches is missing, which could hinder researchers/practitioners from understanding the current process and discovering potential for future improvement in the ML-based AWI community. In this paper, we systematically review the state-of-the-art ML-based AWI approaches. First, we employ a meticulous survey methodology and gather 51 primary studies from 2000/01/01 to 2023/09/01. Then, we outline the typical ML-based AWI workflow, including warning dataset preparation, preprocessing, AWI model construction, and evaluation stages. In such a workflow, we categorize ML-based AWI approaches based on the warning output format. Besides, we analyze the techniques used in each stage, along with their strengths, weaknesses, and distribution. Finally, we provide practical research directions for future ML-based AWI approaches, focusing on aspects like data improvement (e.g., enhancing the warning labeling strategy) and model exploration (e.g., exploring large language models for AWI).

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Demonstration Attack against In-Context Learning for Code Intelligence

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized code intelligence by improving programming productivity and alleviating challenges faced by software developers. To further improve the performance of LLMs on specific code intelligence tasks and reduce training costs, researchers reveal a new capability of LLMs: in-context learning (ICL). ICL allows LLMs to learn from a few demonstrations within a specific context, achieving impressive results without parameter updating. However, the rise of ICL introduces new security vulnerabilities in the code intelligence field. In this paper, we explore a novel security scenario based on the ICL paradigm, where attackers act as third-party ICL agencies and provide users with bad ICL content to mislead LLMs outputs in code intelligence tasks. Our study demonstrates the feasibility and risks of such a scenario, revealing how attackers can leverage malicious demonstrations to construct bad ICL content and induce LLMs to produce incorrect outputs, posing significant threats to system security. We propose a novel method to construct bad ICL content called DICE, which is composed of two stages: Demonstration Selection and Bad ICL Construction, constructing targeted bad ICL content based on the user query and transferable across different query inputs. Ultimately, our findings emphasize the critical importance of securing ICL mechanisms to protect code intelligence systems from adversarial manipulation.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

TestBench: Evaluating Class-Level Test Case Generation Capability of Large Language Models

Software testing is a crucial phase in the software life cycle, helping identify potential risks and reduce maintenance costs. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have proposed an increasing number of LLM-based software testing techniques, particularly in the area of test case generation. Despite the growing interest, limited efforts have been made to thoroughly evaluate the actual capabilities of LLMs in this task. In this paper, we introduce TestBench, a benchmark for class-level LLM-based test case generation. We construct a dataset of 108 Java programs from 9 real-world, large-scale projects on GitHub, each representing a different thematic domain. We then design three distinct types of prompts based on context descriptions, including self-contained context, full context, and simple context. Besides, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that considers five aspects of test cases: syntactic correctness, compilation correctness, test correctness, code coverage rate, and defect detection rate. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic algorithm to repair erroneous test cases generated by LLMs. We evaluate CodeLlama-13b, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 on the TestBench, and our experimental results indicate that larger models demonstrate a greater ability to effectively utilize contextual information, thus generating higher-quality test cases. Smaller models may struggle with the noise introduced by the extensive information contained within the full context. However, when using the simplified version, namely the simple context, which is derived from the full context via abstract syntax tree analysis, the performance of these models improves significantly. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further enhance the effectiveness of models by handling contextual information for test case generation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Mutation-Based Deep Learning Framework Testing Method in JavaScript Environment

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) applications in JavaScript environment have become increasingly popular. As the infrastructure for DL applications, JavaScript DL frameworks play a crucial role in the development and deployment. It is essential to ensure the quality of JavaScript DL frameworks. However, the bottleneck of limited computational resources in the JavaScript environment brings new challenges to framework testing. Specifically, JavaScript DL frameworks are equipped with various optimization mechanisms (e.g., cache reuse, inference acceleration) to overcome the bottleneck of limited computational resources. These optimization mechanisms are overlooked by existing methods, resulting in many bugs in JavaScript DL frameworks being missed. To address the above challenges, we propose a mutation-based JavaScript DL framework testing method named DLJSFuzzer. DLJSFuzzer designs 13 tensor mutation rules targeting the cache reuse mechanism to generate test input tensors. Besides, DLJSFuzzer designs eight model mutation rules targeting the inference acceleration mechanism to generate test input models. To evaluate the effectiveness of DLJSFuzzer, we conduct experiments on the most widely-used JavaScript DL framework, TensorFlow.js. The experimental results show that DLJSFuzzer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both effectiveness and efficiency. DLJSFuzzer successfully detects 21 unique crashes and 126 unique NaN & Inconsistency bugs. All detected crashes have been reported to the open-source community, with 12 of them already confirmed by developers. Additionally, DLJSFuzzer has improved by over 47% in model generation efficiency and over 91% in bug detection efficiency compared to all baselines.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

SoVAR: Building Generalizable Scenarios from Accident Reports for Autonomous Driving Testing

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) have undergone remarkable development and are increasingly employed in safety-critical applications. However, recently reported data on fatal accidents involving ADSs suggests that the desired level of safety has not yet been fully achieved. Consequently, there is a growing need for more comprehensive and targeted testing approaches to ensure safe driving. Scenarios from real-world accident reports provide valuable resources for ADS testing, including critical scenarios and high-quality seeds. However, existing scenario reconstruction methods from accident reports often exhibit limited accuracy in information extraction. Moreover, due to the diversity and complexity of road environments, matching current accident information with the simulation map data for reconstruction poses significant challenges. In this paper, we design and implement SoVAR, a tool for automatically generating road-generalizable scenarios from accident reports. SoVAR utilizes well-designed prompts with linguistic patterns to guide the large language model in extracting accident information from textual data. Subsequently, it formulates and solves accident-related constraints in conjunction with the extracted accident information to generate accident trajectories. Finally, SoVAR reconstructs accident scenarios on various map structures and converts them into test scenarios to evaluate its capability to detect defects in industrial ADSs. We experiment with SoVAR, using accident reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's database to generate test scenarios for the industrial-grade ADS Apollo. The experimental findings demonstrate that SoVAR can effectively generate generalized accident scenarios across different road structures. Furthermore, the results confirm that SoVAR identified 5 distinct safety violation types that contributed to the crash of Baidu Apollo.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

A Survey on Large Language Models for Software Engineering

Software Engineering (SE) is the systematic design, development, maintenance, and management of software applications underpinning the digital infrastructure of our modern world. Very recently, the SE community has seen a rapidly increasing number of techniques employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate a broad range of SE tasks. Nevertheless, existing information of the applications, effects, and possible limitations of LLMs within SE is still not well-studied. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the LLM-based SE community. We summarize 62 representative LLMs of Code across three model architectures, 15 pre-training objectives across four categories, and 16 downstream tasks across five categories. We then present a detailed summarization of the recent SE studies for which LLMs are commonly utilized, including 947 studies for 112 specific code-related tasks across five crucial phases within the SE workflow. We also discuss several critical aspects during the integration of LLMs into SE, such as empirical evaluation, benchmarking, security and reliability, domain tuning, compressing and distillation. Finally, we highlight several challenges and potential opportunities on applying LLMs for future SE studies, such as exploring domain LLMs and constructing clean evaluation datasets. Overall, our work can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the achievements of the existing LLM-based SE studies and promote the practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available and will be continuously updated at the living repository: https://github.com/iSEngLab/AwesomeLLM4SE.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

No Man is an Island: Towards Fully Automatic Programming by Code Search, Code Generation and Program Repair

Automatic programming attempts to minimize human intervention in the generation of executable code, and has been a long-standing challenge in the software engineering community. To advance automatic programming, researchers are focusing on three primary directions: (1) code search that reuses existing code snippets from external databases; (2) code generation that produces new code snippets from natural language; and (3) program repair that refines existing code snippets by fixing detected bugs. Despite significant advancements, the effectiveness of state-of-the-art techniques is still limited, such as the usability of searched code and the correctness of generated code. Motivated by the real-world programming process, where developers usually use various external tools to aid their coding processes, such as code search engines and code testing tools, in this work, we propose \toolname{}, an automatic programming framework that leverages recent large language models (LLMs) to integrate the three research areas to address their inherent limitations. In particular, our framework first leverages different code search strategies to retrieve similar code snippets, which are then used to further guide the code generation process of LLMs. Our framework further validates the quality of generated code by compilers and test cases, and constructs repair prompts to query LLMs for generating correct patches. We conduct preliminary experiments to demonstrate the potential of our framework, \eg helping CodeLlama solve 267 programming problems with an improvement of 62.53\%. As a generic framework, \toolname{} can integrate various code search, generation, and repair tools, combining these three research areas together for the first time. More importantly, it demonstrates the potential of using traditional SE tools to enhance the usability of LLMs in automatic programming.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

CooTest: An Automated Testing Approach for V2X Communication Systems

Perceiving the complex driving environment precisely is crucial to the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. With the tremendous advancement of deep learning and communication technology, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) collaboration has the potential to address limitations in sensing distant objects and occlusion for a single-agent perception system. However, despite spectacular progress, several communication challenges can undermine the effectiveness of multi-vehicle cooperative perception. The low interpretability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and the high complexity of communication mechanisms make conventional testing techniques inapplicable for the cooperative perception of autonomous driving systems (ADS). Besides, the existing testing techniques, depending on manual data collection and labeling, become time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we design and implement CooTest, the first automated testing tool of the V2X-oriented cooperative perception module. CooTest devises the V2X-specific metamorphic relation and equips communication and weather transformation operators that can reflect the impact of the various cooperative driving factors to produce transformed scenes. Furthermore, we adopt a V2X-oriented guidance strategy for the transformed scene generation process and improve testing efficiency. We experiment CooTest with multiple cooperative perception models with different fusion schemes to evaluate its performance on different tasks. The experiment results show that CooTest can effectively detect erroneous behaviors under various V2X-oriented driving conditions. Also, the results confirm that CooTest can improve detection average precision and decrease misleading cooperation errors by retraining with the generated scenes.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Better Debugging: Combining Static Analysis and LLMs for Explainable Crashing Fault Localization

Nowadays, many applications do not exist independently but rely on various frameworks or libraries. The frequent evolution and the complex implementation of framework APIs induce many unexpected post-release crashes. Starting from the crash stack traces, existing approaches either perform direct call graph (CG) tracing or construct datasets with similar crash-fixing records to locate buggy methods. However, these approaches are limited by the completeness of CG or dependent on historical fixing records. Moreover, they fail to explain the buggy candidates by revealing their relationship with the crashing point. To fill the gap, we propose an explainable crashing fault localization approach by combining static analysis and LLM techniques. Our primary insight is that understanding the semantics of exception-throwing statements in the framework code can help find and apprehend the buggy methods in the app code. Based on this idea, first, we design the exception-thrown summary (ETS) that describes the key elements related to each framework-specific exception and extract ETSs by performing static analysis. Then we make data-tracking of its key elements to identify and sort buggy candidates for the given crash. After that, we introduce LLMs to improve the explainability of the localization results. To construct effective LLM prompts, we design the candidate information summary (CIS) that describes multiple types of explanation-related contexts and then extract CISs via static analysis. We apply our approach to one typical scenario, i.e., locating Android framework-specific crashing faults, and implement a tool CrashTracker. For fault localization, it exhibited an overall MRR value of 0.91 in precision. For fault explanation, compared to the naive one produced by static analysis only, the LLM-powered explanation achieved a 67.04% improvement in users' satisfaction score.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

ESALE: Enhancing Code-Summary Alignment Learning for Source Code Summarization

(Source) code summarization aims to automatically generate succinct natural language summaries for given code snippets. Such summaries play a significant role in promoting developers to understand and maintain code. Inspired by neural machine translation, deep learning-based code summarization techniques widely adopt an encoder-decoder framework, where the encoder transforms given code snippets into context vectors, and the decoder decodes context vectors into summaries. Recently, large-scale pre-trained models for source code are equipped with encoders capable of producing general context vectors and have achieved substantial improvements on code summarization. However, although they are usually trained mainly on code-focused tasks and can capture general code features, they still fall short in capturing specific features that need to be summarized. This paper proposes a novel approach to improve code summarization based on summary-focused tasks. Specifically, we exploit a multi-task learning paradigm to train the encoder on three summary-focused tasks to enhance its ability to learn code-summary alignment, including unidirectional language modeling (ULM), masked language modeling (MLM), and action word prediction (AWP). Unlike pre-trained models that mainly predict masked tokens in code snippets, we design ULM and MLM to predict masked words in summaries. Intuitively, predicting words based on given code snippets would help learn the code-summary alignment. Additionally, we introduce the domain-specific task AWP to enhance the ability of the encoder to learn the alignment between action words and code snippets. The extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our approach, called ESALE significantly outperforms baselines in all three widely used metrics, including BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE-L.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Effective, Platform-Independent GUI Testing via Image Embedding and Reinforcement Learning

Software applications have been playing an increasingly important role in various aspects of society. In particular, mobile apps and web apps are the most prevalent among all applications and are widely used in various industries as well as in people's daily lives. To help ensure mobile and web app quality, many approaches have been introduced to improve app GUI testing via automated exploration. Despite the extensive effort, existing approaches are still limited in reaching high code coverage, constructing high-quality models, and being generally applicable. Reinforcement learning-based approaches are faced with difficult challenges, including effective app state abstraction, reward function design, etc. Moreover, they heavily depend on the specific execution platforms, thus leading to poor generalizability and being unable to adapt to different platforms. We propose PIRLTest, an effective platform-independent approach for app testing. It utilizes computer vision and reinforcement learning techniques in a novel, synergistic manner for automated testing. It extracts the GUI widgets from GUI pages and characterizes the corresponding GUI layouts, embedding the GUI pages as states. The app GUI state combines the macroscopic perspective and the microscopic perspective, and attaches the critical semantic information from GUI images. This enables PIRLTest to be platform-independent and makes the testing approach generally applicable on different platforms. PIRLTest explores apps with the guidance of a curiosity-driven strategy, which uses a Q-network to estimate the values of specific state-action pairs to encourage more exploration in uncovered pages without platform dependency. The exploration will be assigned with rewards for all actions, which are designed considering both the app GUI states and the concrete widgets, to help the framework explore more uncovered pages.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Practical, Automated Scenario-based Mobile App Testing

The importance of mobile application (app) quality insurance is increasing with the rapid development of the mobile Internet. Automated test generation approaches, as a dominant direction of app quality insurance, follow specific models or strategies, targeting at optimizing the code coverage. Such approaches lead to a huge gap between testing execution and app business logic. Test scripts developed by human testers consider business logic by focusing on testing scenarios. Due to the GUI-intensive feature of mobile apps, human testers always understand app GUI to organize test scripts for scenarios. This inspires us to utilize domain knowledge from app GUI understanding for scenario-based test generation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, ScenTest, for scenario-based mobile app testing with event knowledge graph (EKG) via GUI image understanding. ScenTest tries to start automated testing by imitating human practices and integrating domain knowledge into scenario-based mobile app testing, realizing fully automated testing on target testing scenarios for the first time. ScenTest extracts four kinds of entities and five kinds of corresponding relationships from crowdsourced test reports, where the test events and app GUI information are presented, and constructs the EKGs for specific scenarios. Then, ScenTest conducts test generation for specific scenarios on different apps with the guidance of EKG with the combination consideration of app current state and testing context. We conduct an evaluation on ScenTest on different aspects. The results show that the test generation of ScenTest on the basis of EKG is effective, and ScenTest can reveal 80+ distinct real-world bugs in specific scenarios compared with representative baselines.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Towards General Robustness Verification of MaxPool-based Convolutional Neural Networks via Tightening Linear Approximation

The robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is vital to modern AI-driven systems. It can be quantified by formal verification by providing a certified lower bound, within which any perturbation does not alter the original input's classification result. It is challenging due to nonlinear components, such as MaxPool. At present, many verification methods are sound but risk losing some precision to enhance efficiency and scalability, and thus, a certified lower bound is a crucial criterion for evaluating the performance of verification tools. In this paper, we present MaxLin, a robustness verifier for MaxPool-based CNNs with tight linear approximation. By tightening the linear approximation of the MaxPool function, we can certify larger certified lower bounds of CNNs. We evaluate MaxLin with open-sourced benchmarks, including LeNet and networks trained on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Tiny ImageNet datasets. The results show that MaxLin outperforms state-of-the-art tools with up to 110.60% improvement regarding the certified lower bound and 5.13 $\times$ speedup for the same neural networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyuanpigo/maxlin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

TransformCode: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Code Embedding via Subtree Transformation

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized software engineering (SE) by enhancing software development efficiency. The advent of pre-trained models (PTMs) leveraging transfer learning has significantly advanced AI for SE. However, existing PTMs that operate on individual code tokens suffer from several limitations: They are costly to train and fine-tune; and they rely heavily on labeled data for fine-tuning on task-specific datasets. In this paper, we present TransformCode, a novel framework that learns code embeddings in a contrastive learning manner. Our framework is encoder-agnostic and language-agnostic, which means that it can leverage any encoder model and handle any programming language. We also propose a novel data-augmentation technique called abstract syntax tree (AST) transformation, which applies syntactic and semantic transformations to the original code snippets, to generate more diverse and robust samples for contrastive learning. Our framework has several advantages over existing methods: (1) It is flexible and adaptable, because it can easily be extended to other downstream tasks that require code representation (such as code-clone detection and classification); (2) it is efficient and scalable, because it does not require a large model or a large amount of training data, and it can support any programming language; (3) it is not limited to unsupervised learning, but can also be applied to some supervised learning tasks by incorporating task-specific labels or objectives; and (4) it can also adjust the number of encoder parameters based on computing resources. We evaluate our framework on several code-related tasks, and demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority over the state-of-the-art methods such as SourcererCC, Code2vec, and InferCode.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

A Critical Review of Large Language Model on Software Engineering: An Example from ChatGPT and Automated Program Repair

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been gaining increasing attention and demonstrated promising performance across a variety of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, such as Automated Program Repair (APR), code summarization, and code completion. For example, ChatGPT, the latest black-box LLM, has been investigated by numerous recent research studies and has shown impressive performance in various tasks. However, there exists a potential risk of data leakage since these LLMs are usually close-sourced with unknown specific training details, e.g., pre-training datasets. In this paper, we seek to review the bug-fixing capabilities of ChatGPT on a clean APR benchmark with different research objectives. We first introduce {\benchmark}, a new benchmark with buggy and the corresponding fixed programs from competitive programming problems starting from 2023, after the training cutoff point of ChatGPT. The results on {\benchmark} show that ChatGPT is able to fix 109 out of 151 buggy programs using the basic prompt within 35 independent rounds, outperforming state-of-the-art LLMs CodeT5 and PLBART by 27.5\% and 62.4\% prediction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of three types of prompts, i.e., problem description, error feedback, and bug localization, leading to additional 34 fixed bugs. Besides, we provide additional discussion from the interactive nature of ChatGPT to illustrate the capacity of a dialog-based repair workflow with 9 additional fixed bugs. Inspired by the findings, we further pinpoint various challenges and opportunities for advanced SE study equipped with such LLMs (e.g.,~ChatGPT) in the near future. More importantly, our work calls for more research on the reevaluation of the achievements obtained by existing black-box LLMs across various SE tasks, not limited to ChatGPT on APR.

cs.SE↗