Meta-RAG on Large Codebases Using Code Summarization

Large Language Model (LLM) systems have been at the forefront of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research in a multitude of domains. One such domain is software development, where researchers have pushed the automation of a number of code tasks through LLM agents. Software development is a complex ecosystem, that stretches far beyond code implementation and well into the realm of code maintenance. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system to localize bugs in large pre-existing codebases using information retrieval and LLMs. Our system introduces a novel Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, Meta-RAG, where we utilize summaries to condense codebases by an average of 79.8%, into a compact, structured, natural language representation. We then use an LLM agent to determine which parts of the codebase are critical for bug resolution, i.e. bug localization. We demonstrate the usefulness of Meta-RAG through evaluation with the SWE-bench Lite dataset. Meta-RAG scores 84.67 % and 53.0 % for file-level and function-level correct localization rates, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance.