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A Survey of Learning-based Automated Program Repair
Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs automatically and
plays a crucial role in software development and maintenance. With the recent
advances in deep learning (DL), an increasing number of APR techniques have
been proposed to leverage neural networks to learn bug-fixing patterns from
massive open-source code repositories. Such learning-based techniques usually
treat APR as a neural machine translation (NMT) task, where buggy code snippets
(i.e., source language) are translated into fixed code snippets (i.e., target
language) automatically. Benefiting from the powerful capability of DL to learn
hidden relationships from previous bug-fixing datasets, learning-based APR
techniques have achieved remarkable performance. In this paper, we provide a
systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the
learning-based APR community. We illustrate the general workflow of
learning-based APR techniques and detail the crucial components, including
fault localization, patch generation, patch ranking, patch validation, and
patch correctness phases. We then discuss the widely-adopted datasets and
evaluation metrics and outline existing empirical studies. We discuss several
critical aspects of learning-based APR techniques, such as repair domains,
industrial deployment, and the open science issue. We highlight several
practical guidelines on applying DL techniques for future APR studies, such as
exploring explainable patch generation and utilizing code features. Overall,
our paper can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the
achievements of the existing learning-based APR techniques and promote the
practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available
at \url{https://github.com/QuanjunZhang/AwesomeLearningAPR}
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