ComPass: Contrastive Learning for Automated Patch Correctness Assessment in Program Repair

Abstract: Automated program repair (APR) attempts to reduce manual debugging efforts and plays a vital role in software maintenance. Despite remarkable progress, APR is still limited in generating overfitting patches, i.e., patches passing available test suites but incorrect. This issue, known as patch overfitting, has become a key concern in the APR community, with numerous approaches proposed to address it. Very recent work proposes a pre-trained LLM (PLM)-based automated patch correctness assessment (APCA) approach, indicating the potential of such PLMs in reasoning about patch correctness. Despite being promising, it is still far from perfect due to various limitations, such as the training paradigm and training dataset. In this paper, we present ComPass, a PLM-based APCA approach that leverages contrastive learning and data augmentation to address the technical limitations of prior work. Our work is inspired by the opportunity to integrate contrastive learning with recent PLMs in the field of patch correctness assessment, where large-scale labeled patches are difficult to obtain. ComPass utilizes code transformation rules to generate semantic-preserving code snippets for both unlabeled pre-training corpus and labeled fine-tuning patches. ComPass then pre-trains PLMs with contrastive learning, which captures code features with the same semantics but different structures. ComPass finally integrates representation embeddings of patch code snippets and fine-tunes PLMs with a binary classifier jointly to assess patch code correctness. Experimental results on 2274 real-world patches from Defects4J demonstrate that ComPass achieves an accuracy of 88.35%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baseline APPT.