Fix Bugs with Transformer through a Neural-Symbolic Edit Grammar
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Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce NSEdit (neural-symbolic edit), a novel Transformer-based code repair method. Given only the source code that contains bugs, NSEdit predicts an editing sequence that can fix the bugs. The edit grammar is formulated as a regular language, and the Transformer uses it as a neural-symbolic scripting interface to generate editing programs. We modify the Transformer and add a pointer network to select the edit locations. An ensemble of rerankers are trained to re-rank the editing sequences generated by beam search. We fine-tune the rerankers on the validation set to reduce over-fitting. NSEdit is evaluated on various code repair datasets and achieved a new state-of-the-art accuracy (24.04%) on the Tufano small dataset of the CodeXGLUE benchmark. NSEdit performs robustly when programs vary from packages to packages and when buggy programs are concrete. We conduct detailed analysis on our methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2022.
Builds on
36 of 57 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 2; 2025: 4.
8 papers.
- 2023RAP-Gen: Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation with CodeT5 for Automatic Program Repaircited by 43
- 2025QualityFlow: An Agentic Workflow for Program Synthesis Controlled by LLM Quality Checkscited by 22
- 2025From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Practical Guide to Code Intelligencecited by 13
- 2024Neuro-Symbolic AI: Explainability, Challenges, and Future Trendscited by 10
- 2023Neural Machine Translation for Code Generationcited by 3
- 2025AuPair: Golden Example Pairs for Code Repaircited by 3
- 2024Bridging the Gap: Representation Spaces in Neuro-Symbolic AIcited by 0
- 2025Toward Neurosymbolic Program Comprehensioncited by 0
- 2025From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Practical Guide to Code Intelligence23 Nov 2025
- 2025AuPair: Golden Example Pairs for Code Repair12 Feb 2025
- 2025Toward Neurosymbolic Program Comprehension3 Feb 2025
- 2025QualityFlow: An Agentic Workflow for Program Synthesis Controlled by LLM Quality Checks20 Jan 2025
- 2024Bridging the Gap: Representation Spaces in Neuro-Symbolic AI7 Nov 2024
- 2024Neuro-Symbolic AI: Explainability, Challenges, and Future Trends7 Nov 2024
- 2023RAP-Gen: Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation with CodeT5 for Automatic Program Repair12 Sep 2023
- 2023Neural Machine Translation for Code Generation22 May 2023