{"ID":2841543,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11012","arxiv_id":"2511.11012","title":"Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Dynamics of Agentic Multi-Hunk Repair","abstract":"Automated program repair has traditionally focused on single-hunk defects, overlooking multi-hunk bugs that are prevalent in real-world systems. Repairing these bugs requires coordinated edits across multiple, disjoint code regions, posing substantially greater challenges. We present the first systematic study of LLM-driven coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini-cli, and Qwen Code) on this task. We evaluate these agents on 372 multi-hunk bugs from the Hunk4J dataset, analyzing 1,488 repair trajectories using fine-grained metrics that capture localization, repair accuracy, regression behavior, and operational dynamics. Results reveal substantial variation: repair accuracy ranges from 25.8% (Qwen Code) to 93.3% (Claude Code) and consistently declines with increasing bug dispersion and complexity. High-performing agents demonstrate superior semantic consistency, achieving positive regression reduction, whereas lower-performing agents often introduce new test failures. Notably, agents do not fail fast; failed repairs consume substantially more resources (39%-343% more tokens) and require longer execution time (43%-427%). Additionally, we developed Maple to provide agents with repository-level context. Empirical results show that Maple improves the repair accuracy of Gemini-cli by 30% through enhanced localization. By analyzing fine-grained metrics and trajectory-level analysis, this study moves beyond accuracy to explain how coding agents localize, reason, and act during multi-hunk repair.","short_abstract":"Automated program repair has traditionally focused on single-hunk defects, overlooking multi-hunk bugs that are prevalent in real-world systems. Repairing these bugs requires coordinated edits across multiple, disjoint code regions, posing substantially greater challenges. We present the first systematic study of LLM-d...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11012","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11012v1","authors":"[\"Noor Nashid\",\"Daniel Ding\",\"Keheliya Gallaba\",\"Ahmed E. Hassan\",\"Ali Mesbah\"]","published":"2025-11-14T07:00:47Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\"]","has_code":false}