# An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their Combinations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [Detect-Localize-Repair: A Unified Framework for Learning to Debug with CodeT5](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14875/) (2022)
- [A Multi-Agent Approach to Fault Localization via Graph-Based Retrieval and Reflexion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13642/) (2024)
- [Generic and Robust Root Cause Localization for Multi-Dimensional Data in Online Service Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03331/) (2023)
- [Fault Localization via Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Mutation Generated Stack Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18005/) (2025)
- [BigIssue: A Realistic Bug Localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10739/) (2022)
- [Infrared: A Meta Bug Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08510/) (2022)
- [Improving MPI Error Detection and Repair with Large Language Models and Bug References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02398/) (2026)
- [From Codebase to Culprit (C2C): Reducing the Search Space for Bugs with Semantic Retrieval and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38402/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of fault localization techniques is critical to their adoption in practice. This paper reports on an empirical study of a wide range of fault localization techniques on real-world faults. Different from previous studies, this paper (1) considers a wide range of techniques from different families, (2) combines different techniques, and (3) considers the execution time of different techniques. Our results reveal that a combined technique significantly outperforms any individual technique (200% increase in faults localized in Top 1), suggesting that combination may be a desirable way to apply fault localization techniques and that future techniques should also be evaluated in the combined setting. Our implementation is publicly available for evaluating and combining fault localization techniques.