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AgentFL: Scaling LLM-based Fault Localization to Project-Level Context

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arxiv 2403.16362 v2 pith:5EKZSAE3 submitted 2024-03-25 cs.SE

classification cs.SE
keywords agentflbugscodefaultlocalizationllm-basedstepbehavior
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Fault Localization (FL) is an essential step during the debugging process. With the strong capabilities of code comprehension, the recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in diagnosing bugs in the code. Nevertheless, due to LLMs' limited performance in handling long contexts, existing LLM-based fault localization remains on localizing bugs within a small code scope (i.e., a method or a class), which struggles to diagnose bugs for a large code scope (i.e., an entire software system). To address the limitation, this paper presents AgentFL, a multi-agent system based on ChatGPT for automated fault localization. By simulating the behavior of a human developer, AgentFL models the FL task as a three-step process, which involves comprehension, navigation, and confirmation. Within each step, AgentFL hires agents with diversified expertise, each of which utilizes different tools to handle specific tasks. Particularly, we adopt a series of auxiliary strategies such as Test Behavior Tracking, Document-Guided Search, and Multi-Round Dialogue to overcome the challenges in each step. The evaluation on the widely used Defects4J-V1.2.0 benchmark shows that AgentFL can localize 157 out of 395 bugs within Top-1, which outperforms the other LLM-based approaches and exhibits complementarity to the state-of-the-art learning-based techniques. Additionally, we confirm the indispensability of the components in AgentFL with the ablation study and demonstrate the usability of AgentFL through a user study. Finally, the cost analysis shows that AgentFL spends an average of only 0.074 dollars and 97 seconds for a single bug.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. SWE-Debate: Competitive Multi-Agent Debate for Software Issue Resolution

    cs.SE 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A competitive multi-agent debate over graph-derived fault propagation chains lifts automated issue resolution on SWE-bench Verified to 41.4% pass@1.

  2. HLSDebugger: Identification and Correction of Logic Bugs in HLS Code with LLM Solutions

    cs.SE 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    HLSDebugger fixes logic bugs in HLS code with 37.6% accuracy, outperforming GPT-4 by over 3x, using an encoder-decoder model trained on a new 300K-sample dataset.

  3. Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On a new 250-bug Linux kernel benchmark, state-of-the-art LLM agents localize at most 41.6 percent of buggy files at rank 1; the proposed LinuxFL+ framework improves this to 52.4 percent.

  4. SACL: Understanding and Combating Textual Bias in Code Retrieval with Semantic-Augmented Reranking and Localization

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Code retrievers rely on surface text like identifiers and docstrings rather than code semantics, and a description-based reranking pipeline, SACL, compensates for that bias but its headline gains come mostly from arti...

  5. Large Language Models for Fault Localization: An Empirical Study

    cs.SE 2025-10 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    An empirical study of four LLMs for statement-level Java fault localization finds Gemini-2.5-Flash most accurate, bug-report context strongly helpful, and few-shot/CoT gains inconsistent.

  6. LLM-Based Agentic Systems for Software Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities

    cs.SE 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A survey of LLM-based multi-agent systems across the software development life cycle, plus a research agenda for orchestration, human coordination, cost, and data.

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