TreeMind: Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports via LLM-empowered Monte Carlo Tree Search

Abstract: Automatically reproducing Android app crashes from textual bug reports is challenging, particularly when the reports are incomplete and the modern UI exhibits high combinatorial complexity. Existing approaches based on reinforcement learning or LLMs exhibit limitations in such scenarios. They struggle to infer unobserved steps and reconstruct the underlying user action sequences to navigate the vast UI interaction space, primarily due to limited goal-directed reasoning and planning. We present TreeMind, a novel technique that integrates LLMs with a customized Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to achieve strategic UI exploration in bug reproduction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine external decision-making with LLM semantic reasoning for reliable bug reproduction. We formulate the reproduction task as a target-driven search problem, leveraging MCTS as the core planning mechanism to iteratively refine action sequences. To enhance MCTS with semantic reasoning, we introduce two LLM-guided agents with distinct roles: Expander generates top-k promising actions based on the current UI state and exploration history, while Simulator estimates the likelihood that each action leads toward successful reproduction. By incorporating multi-modal UI inputs and advanced prompting techniques, TreeMind conducts feedback-aware navigation that identifies missing but essential user actions and incrementally reconstructs the reproduction paths. We evaluate TreeMind on a dataset of 93 real-world Android bug reports from three widely-used benchmarks. Experimental results show that it significantly outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines in reproduction success rate. A real-world case study indicates that integrating LLM reasoning with MCTS-based planning is a compelling direction for automated bug reproduction.