# Do the Fix Ingredients Already Exist? An Empirical Inquiry into the Redundancy Assumptions of Program Repair Approaches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6322 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6322/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10868/) (2023)
- [RAP-Gen: Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation with CodeT5 for Automatic Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06057/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Much initial research on automatic program repair has focused on experimental results to probe their potential to find patches and reduce development effort. Relatively less effort has been put into understanding the hows and whys of such approaches. For example, a critical assumption of the GenProg technique is that certain bugs can be fixed by copying and re-arranging existing code. In other words, GenProg assumes that the fix ingredients already exist elsewhere in the code. In this paper, we formalize these assumptions around the concept of ''temporal redundancy''. A temporally redundant commit is only composed of what has already existed in previous commits. Our experiments show that a large proportion of commits that add existing code are temporally redundant. This validates the fundamental redundancy assumption of GenProg.