Detecting Condition-Related Bugs with Control Flow Graph Neural Network

Abstract

Automated bug detection is essential for high-quality software development and has attracted much attention over the years. Among the various bugs, previous studies show that the condition expressions are quite error-prone and the condition-related bugs are commonly found in practice. Traditional approaches to automated bug detection are usually limited to compilable code and require tedious manual effort. Recent deep learning-based work tends to learn general syntactic features based on Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) or apply the existing Graph Neural Networks over program graphs. However, AST-based neural models may miss important control flow information of source code, and existing Graph Neural Networks for bug detection tend to learn local neighbourhood structure information. Generally, the condition-related bugs are highly influenced by control flow knowledge, therefore we propose a novel CFG-based Graph Neural Network (CFGNN) to automatically detect condition-related bugs, which includes a graph-structured LSTM unit to efficiently learn the control flow knowledge and long-distance context information. We also adopt the API-usage attention mechanism to leverage the API knowledge. To evaluate the proposed approach, we collect real-world bugs in popular GitHub repositories and build a large-scale condition-related bug dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for detecting condition-related bugs.