A study on Prompt Design, Advantages and Limitations of ChatGPT for Deep Learning Program Repair

ChatGPT has revolutionized many research and industrial fields. ChatGPT has shown great potential in software engineering to boost various traditional tasks such as program repair, code understanding, and code generation. However, whether automatic program repair (APR) applies to deep learning (DL) programs is still unknown. DL programs, whose decision logic is not explicitly encoded in the source code, have posed unique challenges to APR. While to repair DL programs, an APR approach needs to not only parse the source code syntactically but also needs to understand the code intention. With the best prior work, the performance of fault localization is still far less than satisfactory (only about 30%). Therefore, in this paper, we explore ChatGPT's capability for DL program repair by asking three research questions. (1) Can ChatGPT debug DL programs effectively? (2) How can ChatGPT's repair performance be improved by prompting? (3) In which way can dialogue help facilitate the repair? On top of that, we categorize the common aspects useful for prompt design for DL program repair. Also, we propose various prompt templates to facilitate the performance and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT's abilities such as detecting bad code smell, code refactoring, and detecting API misuse/deprecation.