Title: Semantic Code Repair using Neuro-Symbolic Transformation Networks,
Abstract: We study the problem of semantic code repair, which can be broadly defined as
automatically fixing non-syntactic bugs in source code. The majority of past
work in semantic code repair assumed access to unit tests against which
candidate repairs could be validated. In contrast, the goal here is to develop
a strong statistical model to accurately predict both bug locations and exact
fixes without access to information about the intended correct behavior of the
program. Achieving such a goal requires a robust contextual repair model, which
we train on a large corpus of real-world source code that has been augmented
with synthetically injected bugs. Our framework adopts a two-stage approach
where first a large set of repair candidates are generated by rule-based
processors, and then these candidates are scored by a statistical model using a
novel neural network architecture which we refer to as Share, Specialize, and
Compete. Specifically, the architecture (1) generates a shared encoding of the
source code using an RNN over the abstract syntax tree, (2) scores each
candidate repair using specialized network modules, and (3) then normalizes
these scores together so they can compete against one another in comparable
probability space. We evaluate our model on a real-world test set gathered from
GitHub containing four common categories of bugs. Our model is able to predict
the exact correct repair 41\% of the time with a single guess, compared to 13\%
accuracy for an attentional sequence-to-sequence model.