Less training, more repairing please: revisiting automated program repair via zero-shot learning

Due to the promising future of Automated Program Repair (APR), researchers have proposed various APR techniques, including heuristic-based, template-based, and constraint-based techniques. Among such classic APR techniques, template-based techniques have been widely recognized as state of the art. However, such template-based techniques require predefined templates to perform repair, and their effectiveness is thus limited. To this end, researchers have leveraged the recent advances in Deep Learning to further improve APR. Such learning-based techniques typically view APR as a Neural Machine Translation problem, using the buggy/fixed code snippets as the source/target languages for translation. In this way, such techniques heavily rely on large numbers of high-quality bug-fixing commits, which can be extremely costly/challenging to construct and may limit their edit variety and context representation.