From Codebase to Culprit (C2C): Reducing the Search Space for Bugs with Semantic Retrieval and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
We introduce C2C (From Codebase to Culprit), a framework for precise bug localization that progressively reduces the debugging search space across multiple levels of granularity: files, functions, and lines of code. To mirror developer's natural top-down debugging workflows, C2C integrates semantic retrieval and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) in a two-stage process. First, it performs recall-oriented retrieval of buggy candidates via semantic vector similarity search using bug-report text, including available stack-trace information, against a database of embeddings, where the embeddings are fine-tuned via contrastive learning with CodeBERT. Building on this reduced search spac...
| Authors | Ankur Garg, Corey Yang-Smith, Rishav Rishav et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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