Patch Correctness Assessment: A Survey

• Published in: ACM transactions on software engineering and methodology 2025-02, Vol.34 (2), p.1-50
• Main Authors: Fei, Zhiwei, Ge, Jidong, Li, Chuanyi, Wang, Tianqi, Li, Yuning, Zhang, Haodong, Huang, LiGuo, Luo, Bin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer systems organization; Robotics
• ISSN: 1049-331X; 1557-7392
• DOI: 10.1145/3702972

Most automated program repair methods rely on test cases to determine the correctness of the generated patches. However, due to the incompleteness of available test suites, some patches that pass all the test cases may still be incorrect. This issue is known as the patch overfitting problem. Overfitting problem is a longstanding problem in automated program repair. Due to overfitting patches, the patches obtained by automated program repair tools require further validation to determine their correctness. Researchers have proposed many methods to automatically assess the correctness of patches, but no systematic review provides a detailed introduction to this problem, the existing solutions, and the challenges. To address this deficiency, we systematically review the existing approaches to patch correctness assessment. We first offer a few examples of overfitting patches to acquire a more detailed understanding of this problem. We then propose a comprehensive categorization of publicly available techniques and datasets, examine the commonly used evaluation metrics, and perform an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of the existing models in addressing the challenge of overfitting. Based on our analysis, we provided the difficulties encountered by current methodologies, alongside the possible avenues for future research exploration.