In recent years, template-based and NMT-based automated program repair methods have been widely studied and achieved promising results. However, there are still disadvantages in both methods. The template-based methods cannot fix the bugs whose types are beyond the capabilities of the templates and only use the syntax information to guide the patch synthesis, while the NMT-based methods intend to generate the small range of fixed code for better performance and may suffer from the OOV (Out-of-vocabulary) problem. To solve these problems, we propose a novel template-based neural program repair approach called TENURE to combine the template-based and NMT- based methods. First, we build two large-scale datasets for 35 fix templates from template-based method and one special fix template (single-line code generation) from NMT-based method, respectively. Second, the encoder-decoder models are adopted to learn deep semantic features for generating patch intermediate representations (IRs) for different templates. The optimized copy mechanism is also used to alleviate the OOV problem. Third, based on the combined patch IRs for different templates, three tools are developed to recover real patches from the patch IRs, replace the unknown tokens, and filter the patch candidates with compilation errors by leveraging the project-specific information. On Defects4J-vl.2, TENURE can fix 79 bugs and 52 bugs with perfect and Ochiai fault localization, respectively. It is able to repair 50 and 32 bugs as well on Defects4J-v2.0. Compared with the existing template-based and NMT-based studies, TENURE achieves the best performance in all experiments.

@inproceedings{MengWZSLH23,
  title = {Template-based Neural Program Repair},
  author = {Xiangxin Meng and Xu Wang and Hongyu Zhang and Hailong Sun and Xudong Liu and Chunming Hu},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1109/icse48619.2023.00127}
}