# Enhancing repository-level software repair via repository-aware knowledge graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21710 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21710/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [SWE-Debate: Competitive Multi-Agent Debate for Software Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23348/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation: A Survey with Focus on Repository-Level Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04905/) (2025)
- [SWE-Effi: Re-Evaluating Software AI Agent System Effectiveness Under Resource Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09853/) (2025)
- [From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Practical Guide to Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18538/) (2025)
- [SGAgent: Suggestion-Guided LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Repository-Level Software Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23647/) (2026)
- [A Taxonomy of Prompt Defects in LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14404/) (2025)
- [SWE-Factory: Your Automated Factory for Issue Resolution Training Data and Evaluation Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10954/) (2025)
- [InfCode: Adversarial Iterative Refinement of Tests and Patches for Reliable Software Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16004/) (2025)
- [Agentic Software Issue Resolution with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22256/) (2025)
- [Codebase-Memory: Tree-Sitter-Based Knowledge Graphs for LLM Code Exploration via MCP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27277/) (2026)
- [How Safe Are AI-Generated Patches? A Large-scale Study on Security Risks in LLM and Agentic Automated Program Repair on SWE-bench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02976/) (2025)
- [RGFL: Reasoning Guided Fault Localization for Automated Program Repair Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18044/) (2026)
- [GraphLocator: Graph-guided Causal Reasoning for Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22469/) (2025)
- [From Historical Patches to Repair Plans: Outcome-Conditioned Reasoning for Repository-Level Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23257/) (2026)
- [Engineering Reliable Coding Agents: Evaluating and Operating the System Around the Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13867/) (2026)
- [ARISE: A Repository-level Graph Representation and Toolset for Agentic Program Repair and Fault Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03117/) (2026)
- [From Empirical Evaluation to Context-Aware Enhancement: Repairing Regression Errors with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13182/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Agents for Automated Program Repair in Ruby](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03925/) (2025)
- [BackportBench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Automated Backporting of Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01396/) (2025)
- [Is Agentic AI Ready for Real-World Hardware Engineering? A Deep Dive with Phoenix-bench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15226/) (2026)
- [RepoRescue: An Empirical Study of LLM Agents on Whole-Repository Compatibility Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01213/) (2026)
- [ContextSniper: AntTrail's Token-Efficient Code Memory for Repository-Level Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01916/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Issue Resolver: Towards Zero-Touch Code Maintenance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08492/) (2025)
- [Context-Augmented Code Generation Using Programming Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20810/) (2026)
- [Beyond Textual Repository Exploration: Dual-Modal Structural Reasoning for Agentic Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01929/) (2026)
- [XAgent: eXecution-guided Agentic AI for Effective Localization and Resolution of GitHub Issues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09769/) (2026)
- [Do Tool Calls Execute as Intended? Measuring and Repairing Intent-Execution Correspondence in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04375/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Repository-level software repair faces challenges in bridging semantic gaps between issue descriptions and code patches. Existing approaches, which primarily rely on large language models (LLMs), are hindered by semantic ambiguities, limited understanding of structural context, and insufficient reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose KGCompass with two innovations: (1) a novel repository-aware knowledge graph (KG) that accurately links repository artifacts (issues and pull requests) and codebase entities (files, classes, and functions), allowing us to effectively narrow down the vast search space to only 20 most relevant functions with accurate candidate fault locations and contextual information, and (2) a path-guided repair mechanism that leverages KG-mined entity paths, tracing through which allows us to augment LLMs with relevant contextual information to generate precise patches along with their explanations. Experimental results in the SWE-bench Lite demonstrate that KGCompass achieves state-of-the-art single-LLM repair performance (58.3%) and function-level fault location accuracy (56.0%) across open-source approaches with a single repair model, costing only 0.2 per repair. Among the bugs that KGCompass successfully localizes, 89.7% lack explicit location hints in the issue and are found only through multi-hop graph traversal, where pure LLMs struggle to locate bugs accurately. Relative to pure-LLM baselines, KGCompass lifts the resolved rate by 50.8% on Claude-4 Sonnet, 30.2% on Claude-3.5 Sonnet, 115.7% on DeepSeek-V3, and 156.4% on Qwen2.5 Max. These consistent improvements demonstrate that this graph-guided repair framework delivers model-agnostic, cost-efficient repair and sets a strong new baseline for repository-level repair.