• Paper: On the Feasibility of Deduplicating Compiler Bugs with Bisection

    From John R Levine@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jul 1 12:12:29 2025
    Abstract

    Random testing has proven to be an effective technique for compiler
    validation. However, the debugging of bugs identified through random
    testing presents a significant challenge due to the frequent occurrence of duplicate test programs that expose identical compiler bugs. The process
    to identify duplicates is a practical research problem known as bug deduplication. Prior methodologies for compiler bug deduplication
    primarily rely on program analysis to extract bug-related features for duplicate identification, which can result in substantial computational overhead and limited generalizability. This paper investigates the
    feasibility of employing bisection, a standard debugging procedure largely overlooked in prior research on compiler bug deduplication, for this
    purpose. Our study demonstrates that the utilization of bisection to
    locate failure-inducing commits provides a valuable criterion for deduplication, albeit one that requires supplementary techniques for more accurate identification. Building on these results, we introduce BugLens,
    a novel deduplication method that primarily uses bisection, enhanced by
    the identification of bug-triggering optimizations to minimize false
    negatives. Empirical evaluations conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that BugLens significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art analysis-based methodologies Tamer and D3 by saving an average of 26.98%
    and 9.64% human effort to identify the same number of distinct bugs. Given
    the inherent simplicity and generalizability of bisection, it presents a
    highly practical solution for compiler bug deduplication in real-world applications.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23281

    Regards,
    John Levine, [email protected], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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