Learning Project-wise Subsequent Code Edits via Interleaving Neural-based Induction and Tool-based Deduction

Original Abstract

In industrial and open-source software engineering tasks, developers often perform project-wise code editing tasks, including feature enhancement, refactoring, and bug fixing, where the leading AI models are expected to support the productivity. Hence, researchers and practitioners have proposed and adopted many LLM-based solutions to facilitate their real-world development. However, they largely suffer from the balance among predicting scope, accuracy, and efficiency. For example, solutions like Cursor achieve high accuracy only in a local editing scope while its performance drops on cross-file edits. In contrast, solutions like CoEdPilot exhibit efficiency limitations when used to predict project-wise edits. In this work, we propose TRACE (Tool-integrated RecommendAtion for Code Editing), a novel subsequent code editing solution to push the boundary of scope, accuracy, and efficiency. Our rationale lies in that code edits are triggered for either semantic or syntactic reasons. Therefore, TRACE predicts subsequent edits by interleaving neural-based induction for semantic edit prediction and tool-based deduction for syntactic edit prediction. The tools can be any IDE facilities, such as refactoring tools (e.g., rename) or linting tools (e.g., use-def), providing decent performance of deducing edit-location and edit-generation. Technically, we address the challenge of (1) when to interleave between neural-based and tool-based prediction and (2) how to further improve the performance of neural-based prediction. As for the former, we learn a neural model to detect when to invoke IDE editing tools. As for the latter, we propose a novel and fine-grained editing representation to further boost the performance of neural editing models. ......