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Causality-Based Fault Localization — arXiv:2611.01292

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01292
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-11-03T11:27:17.836Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 05718ffcc92a7bc4068f89004b41b56d1f9e7c986a62364afaeadd7c5ad67127
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_ed68fca4ea4e

How to cite

Causality-Based Fault Localization — arXiv:2611.01292 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01292 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_ed68fca4ea4e (Metraipolis archive dc_ed68fca4ea4e, sha256 05718ffcc92a7bc4068f89004b41b56d1f9e7c986a62364afaeadd7c5ad67127)

BibTeX

@misc{dced68fca4ea4e,
  title = {Causality-Based Fault Localization — arXiv:2611.01292},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01292},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_ed68fca4ea4e; sha256 05718ffcc92a7bc4068f89004b41b56d1f9e7c986a62364afaeadd7c5ad67127},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01292. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

We introduce Causality-Based Fault Localization (CBFL), a novel approach to fault localization grounded in the theory of actual causality. We use the notion of causal responsibility to formalize and define the contribution of a given location in the source code under the context of a failing test. We also utilize a distance metric to prioritize minimal fixes and penalize broken tests, leading to more interpretable and fixable fault localization. We implemented CBFL in a tool, SoftReX, and our evaluation results demonstrate that SoftReX outperforms state-of-the-art Mutation-Based Fault Localization (MBFL) tools based on Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Top-1 by 16% on both metrics, when using the same set of mutants. We also propose a sophisticated mutation generation strategy based on the structure and representation of the program to improve the accuracy of our ranked list, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.6x in terms of required mutants evaluated while remaining competitive in performance.

Tema degli esploratori: calcolo e infrastrutture (elenco arXiv cs.SE, nuovi lavori del giorno).
Categorie arXiv: Software Engineering (cs.SE).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01292 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-11-03T11:02:52.187Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SE/new (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).