{"ID":6537650,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-14T02:54:43.516908796Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-15T03:28:55.185153975Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11046","arxiv_id":"2607.11046","title":"Retrieval-Oriented Code Representations in Agentic Bug Localization","abstract":"LLM-based agents are increasingly being used to support software development, yet their performance in repository-level tasks depends on retrieving the right code context. Existing studies have explored file-level localization using traditional information retrieval over file paths and raw source code. However, the role of textual code representations in retrieval and localization remains underexplored. We study file-level bug localization as a representation-driven retrieval problem. Across the Long Code Arena (LCA) and SWE-bench Verified (SWE) datasets, we compare five code representations: file paths, raw source code, and three LLM-generated textual representations. Our experiments include lexical, semantic, and LLM-based retrieval, followed by LLM-based post-retrieval ranking. We quantify the cost incurred by a representation through the representation footprint. We find that the choice of code representation affects both localization effectiveness and cost. Role-aware summaries outperform file-path representations by up to 40% Hit@5 while requiring a representation footprint 10.4 to 20.9x smaller than raw source code. Combining complementary representation results and ranking retrieved candidates with an LLM provides further gains of up to 31.9% and 42.0%, respectively. Overall, role-aware summaries provide the best cost-effectiveness trade-off, while raw source code offers effectiveness in some settings at a significantly higher cost. A case study with Agentless reveals the utility of our techniques within a well-known pipeline, reaching 94% Hit@6 on file localization (+4.7% against the baseline). Our findings suggest that code representation should be treated as a first-class design choice in agentic localization pipelines, guided by pipeline stage and cost-accuracy requirements.","short_abstract":"LLM-based agents are increasingly being used to support software development, yet their performance in repository-level tasks depends on retrieving the right code context. Existing studies have explored file-level localization using traditional information retrieval over file paths and raw source code. However, the rol...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11046","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11046v1","authors":"[\"Genevieve Caumartin\",\"Tse-Hsun\",\"Chen\",\"Diego Elias Costa\"]","published":"2026-07-13T03:18:22Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\"]","has_code":false}