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To date, over 40 Automated Program Repair (APR) tools have been designed with varying bug-fixing strategies, which have been demonstrated to have complementary performance in terms of being effective for different bug classes. Intuitively, it should be feasible to improve the overall bug-fixing performance of APR via assembling existing tools. Unfortunately, simply invoking all available APR tools for a given bug can result in unacceptable costs on APR execution as well as on patch validation (via expensive testing). Therefore, while assembling existing tools is appealing, it requires an efficient strategy to reconcile the need to fix more bugs and the requirements for practicality. In light of this problem, we propose a Preference-based Ensemble Program Repair framework (P-EPR), which seeks to effectively rank APR tools for repairing different bugs. P-EPR is the first non-learning-based APR ensemble method that is novel in its exploitation of repair patterns as a major source of knowledge for ranking APR tools and its reliance on a dynamic update strategy that enables it to immediately exploit and benefit from newly derived repair results. Experimental results show that P-EPR outperforms existing strategies significantly both in flexibility and effectiveness., Comment: accepted by icse2024 early

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to automatically fix bugs in the source code. Recently, as advances in Deep Learning (DL) field, there is a rise of Neural Program Repair (NPR) studies, which formulate APR as a translation task from buggy code to correct code and adopt neural networks based on encoder-decoder architecture. Compared with other APR techniques, NPR approaches have a great advantage in applicability because they do not need any specification (i.e., a test suite). Although NPR has been a hot research direction, there isn't any overview on this field yet. In order to help interested readers understand architectures, challenges and corresponding solutions of existing NPR systems, we conduct a literature review on latest studies in this paper. We begin with introducing the background knowledge on this field. Next, to be understandable, we decompose the NPR procedure into a series of modules and explicate various design choices on each module. Furthermore, we identify several challenges and discuss the effect of existing solutions. Finally, we conclude and provide some promising directions for future research., Comment: accepted by Internetware '22