FURI | Fall 2025

Exploring and Explaining the Performance of PREP’s Impact on GenProg

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Automated program repair (APR) repairs software bugs by automatically suggesting small changes to the software. Program repair enhancement via preprocessing (PREP) investigates one potential explanation for this: that the way that source code is represented does not match the operators used by APR tools. PREP transforms input programs before they are passed to APR tools, which helps existing tools like GenProg discover new and correct patches that were previously missed. This research evaluates the effectiveness of PREP transformations in improving GenProg’s performance to automatically improve the reliability and security of software programs.