Papers for

code review engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Core change aware model improves commit message quality across languages

CAMGen: A Core Change-Aware Multi-View Framework for Commit Message Generation

Abstract: Commit messages help developers understand code changes and support software maintenance. Recent approaches use repository context to improve commit message generation (CMG) with large language models (LLMs). However, existing CMG methods provide limited support for understanding how local edits affect functionality jointly implemented by multiple code entities. This functional understanding is essential for generating commit messages that explain the main change and its impact. To address this problem, we propose CAMGen, a core change-aware multi-view commit message generation framework that incorporates functional context into generation. CAMGen identifies core entities that represent the primary change intent. It then forms candidate functional units through repository-wide semantic clustering and uses those containing the core entities to construct a Functional Semantic View. This view supplies semantic context for interpreting the affected functionality. CAMGen also uses context provided by the Structural Dependency View and the Historical Exemplar View. The context from all three views is then provided to the LLM together with the code diff to guide CMG. The experimental results show that CAMGen outperforms representative CMG baselines across three programming languages. Human evaluation further shows that CAMGen generates more complete commit messages with clearer explanations of change rationale and impact. These results demonstrate the value of functional context and complementary repository information for CMG.

Thu 22 OctSoftware Engineering
The gist
Developers write commit messages to explain what code changes do, but current tools often miss how edits affect related parts of the code working together. The authors created CAMGen, a system that better understands these connections by looking at key code parts and their functions across a whole project. This helps the system generate clearer commit messages that explain the main changes and their impact. Tests show CAMGen works better than other tools in several programming languages and people found its messages easier to understand.
Open → 2610.31552v1

Execution guided ai improves fixing and locating github issues

XAgent: eXecution-guided Agentic AI for Effective Localization and Resolution of GitHub Issues

Abstract: Agentic AI has enabled capabilities in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously resolve repository-level GitHub issues. However, due to the reliance on limited static description of issues, existing agentic approaches suffer from incorrect localization and incomplete validation. Solely relying on this information can bias LLM reasoning toward the narrow scope of the issue description, leading to incomplete patches that fail to address the underlying issue. In this paper, we present XAgent, an execution-guided agentic framework that analyzes dynamic behavior and additional program context to localize and validate issues. The experimental results on the SWE-bench-lite dataset demonstrate that XAgent outperforms other existing approaches, achieving a resolve rate of 62.0% and a function localization accuracy of 72.8%, while maintaining cost efficiency. Our analysis further shows that XAgent successfully resolves 7 additional issues that the top existing baselines fail to address. This work highlights a shift from static, description-oriented patch generation toward dynamic execution-guided issue resolution, opening new opportunities for LLM-based coding agents to achieve more robust and generalizable software maintenance.

Wed 9 SeptSoftware Engineering
The gist
Fixing bugs on GitHub often depends only on the problem descriptions, which can miss important details and lead to incomplete fixes. The authors created XAgent, an AI system that looks at how code actually runs and gathers more context to better find and fix issues. Their tests show XAgent fixes more problems and spots the right parts of code more accurately than other methods. This approach moves beyond just reading problem descriptions to using real code behavior, making fixes more reliable.
Open → 2609.09769v1