Dropped-grounding fault localization

Determine a method that achieves a substantial and stable gain over the appropriate candidate-pool floor when localizing dropped-grounding faults in the CatchBench-Gold dependency-graph benchmark.

Background

CatchBench-Gold evaluates localization of two injected dependency-state faults: stale-state reads and dropped grounding. Dropped grounding removes one required dependency from a step, leaving that step ungrounded. On the eligibility-matched candidate pool, the reported methods do not produce a substantial and stable improvement over the random floor; the span-based and degree-based detectors remain at or below the relevant baseline, and the generic graph detector’s apparent lift is too small to establish reliable localization.

The authors explicitly classify dropped-grounding localization as unresolved rather than treating the diagnostic results as evidence of a solved problem. Because the Gold substrate is itself artifact-limited and remains a mechanism diagnostic, progress must also be evaluated on a defensible substrate before the result can carry evidential benchmark weight.