[2505.17703] Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing Bugs in Continuous Program Spaces

Computer Science > Programming Languages arXiv:2505.17703 (cs) [Submitted on 23 May 2025 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2026 (this version, v3)] Title:Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing Bugs in Continuous Program Spaces Authors:André Silva, Gustav Thorén, Martin Monperrus View a PDF of the paper titled Gradient-Based Program Repair: Fixing Bugs in Continuous Program Spaces, by Andr\'e Silva and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Automatic program repair seeks to generate correct code from buggy programs, with most approaches searching the correct program in a discrete, symbolic space of source code tokens. This symbolic search is fundamentally limited by its inability to directly reason about program behavior. We introduce Gradient-Based Program Repair (GBPR), a new approach that recasts program repair as continuous optimization in a differentiable numerical program space. Our core insight is to compile symbolic programs into differentiable numerical representations, enabling search in the numerical program space directly guided by program behavior. To evaluate GBPR, we present RaspBugs, a new benchmark of 1,466 buggy symbolic RASP programs and their respective numerical representations. Our experiments demonstrate that GBPR can effectively repair buggy symbolic programs by gradient-based optimization in the numerical program space, with convincing repair trajectories. To our knowledge, we are the first to state program repair as continuous optimization in...