Towards Explorative IRBL: Combining Semantic Retrieval with LLM-driven Iterative Code Exploration

Information Retrieval-based Bug Localization (IRBL) aims to identify buggy source files for a given bug report. Traditional and deep learning-based IRBL techniques often suffer from vocabulary mismatch and dependence on project-specific metadata. In contrast, recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches struggle to provide appropriate context to the model: they either restrict analysis to a fixed set of candidate files, overwhelm the model with repository-wide information, or rely on explicit bug report cues to guide context collection. To address these issues, we propose GenLoc, a technique that combines semantic retrieval with LLM-driven code-exploration functions to iteratively analyze the code base and identify buggy files. We evaluate GenLoc on three complementary benchmarks, including large-scale and recent Java datasets as well as the Python based SWE-bench Lite dataset. Results demonstrate that GenLoc substantially outperforms traditional IRBL, deep learning-based approaches and recent LLM-based methods, while also localizing bugs that other techniques fail to detect.

Artifacts

The artifacts are publicly available here.

Publications

More details about can be found in our publication below:

• Towards Explorative IRBL: Combining Semantic Retrieval with LLM-driven Iterative Code Exploration
  Moumita Asad, Rafed Muhammad Yasir, and Sam Malek
  International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2026 (To appear).
  [PDF]