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LLMs Are Bug Replicators: An Empirical Study on LLMs' Completing Bug-Prone Code (arxiv.org)
1 point by rntn on Mar 19, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested seven code-writing AI tools on real bug-prone code, filling in missing lines around known bugs and checking against the fixed version. Correct answers came less than half as often as on normal code, and 44% of mistakes copied the exact original bug.

Abstract · LLMs are Bug Replicators: An Empirical Study on LLMs' Capability in Completing Bug-prone Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code completion. However, the training data used to develop these models often contain a significant amount of buggy code. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these buggy instances influence LLMs' performance when tackling bug-prone code completion tasks. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first empirical study evaluating the performance of LLMs in completing bug-prone code. Through extensive experiments on 7 LLMs and the Defects4J dataset, we analyze LLMs' accuracy, robustness, and limitations in this challenging context. Our experimental results show that completing bug-prone code is significantly more challenging for LLMs than completing normal code. Notably, in bug-prone tasks, the likelihood of LLMs generating correct code is nearly the same as generating buggy code, and it is substantially lower than in normal code completion tasks (e.g., 12.27% vs. 29.85% for GPT-4). To our surprise, 44.44% of the bugs LLMs make are completely identical to the pre-fix version, indicating that LLMs have been seriously biased by historical bugs when completing code. Additionally, we investigate the effectiveness of existing post-processing techniques and find that while they can improve consistency, they do not significantly reduce error rates in bug-prone code scenarios. Our research highlights the limitations of current LLMs in handling bug-prone code and underscores the need for improved models and post-processing strategies to enhance code completion accuracy in real-world development environments.

Liwei Guo, Sixiang Ye, Zeyu Sun, Xiang Chen, Yuxia Zhang, Bo Wang, Jie M. Zhang, Zheng Li, Yong Liu
arXiv:2503.11082 · cs.SE · submitted Mar 14, 2025
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