arXiv subjects

Xianlin Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Xianlin Zhao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

FeatX: Editing Software by Editing Features for Repository-Level Code Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for software evolution, yet most interaction paradigms remain code-centric and require manual context management and prompt iteration. We present FeatX, a feature-oriented tool for editing software by editing features. Given an existing repository, FeatX extracts a hierarchical epic-feature structure with explicit feature-to-code mappings, then invokes a three-stage Evolution Agent to translate feature edits into code patches. The workflow is exposed through four coordinated panels. Across a controlled user study and replay experiments on 38 real-world feature-editing commits, FeatX significantly reduces cognitive load and improves usability compared with vanilla ChatGPT. It also achieves a 42.6\% relative improvement in function-level modification localization F1 over strong LLM baselines, at substantially lower cost (\$0.07 in total). The tool and collected dataset are available at https://github.com/a496263365/FeatX/tree/demo, with a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/OZqKZ4Ii-yM.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

RepoSummary: Feature-Oriented Summarization and Documentation Generation for Code Repositories

Repository summarization is a crucial research question in development and maintenance for software engineering. Existing repository summarization techniques primarily focus on summarizing code according to the directory tree, which is insufficient for tracing high-level features to the methods that collaboratively implement them. To address these limitations, we propose RepoSummary, a feature-oriented code repository summarization approach that simultaneously generates repository documentation automatically. Furthermore, it establishes more accurate traceability links from functional features to the corresponding code elements, enabling developers to rapidly locate relevant methods and files during code comprehension and maintenance. Comprehensive experiments against the state-of-the-art baseline (HGEN) demonstrate that RepoSummary achieves higher feature coverage and more accurate traceability. On average, it increases the rate of completely covered features in manual documentation from 61.2% to 71.1%, improves file-level traceability recall from 29.9% to 53.0%, and generates documentation that is more conceptually consistent, easier to understand, and better formatted than that produced by existing approaches.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Issue Retrieval and Verification Enhanced Supplementary Code Comment Generation

Issue reports have been recognized to contain rich information for retrieval-augmented code comment generation. However, how to minimize hallucinations in the generated comments remains significant challenges. In this paper, we propose IsComment, an issue-based LLM retrieval and verification approach for generating method's design rationale, usage directives, and so on as supplementary code comments. We first identify five main types of code supplementary information that issue reports can provide through code-comment-issue analysis. Next, we retrieve issue sentences containing these types of supplementary information and generate candidate code comments. To reduce hallucinations, we filter out those candidate comments that are irrelevant to the code or unverifiable by the issue report, making the code comment generation results more reliable. Our experiments indicate that compared with LLMs, IsComment increases the coverage of manual supplementary comments from 33.6% to 72.2% for ChatGPT, from 35.8% to 88.4% for GPT-4o, and from 35.0% to 86.2% for DeepSeek-V3. Compared with existing work, IsComment can generate richer and more useful supplementary code comments for programming understanding, which is quantitatively evaluated through the MESIA metric on both methods with and without manual code comments.

cs.SE↗