Zewen Tao
Author directory2026
Externalizing Requirement-to-Repair Artifacts as Observable Traces for LLM-Based Program Repair
Zewen Tao | Shin-nosuke Ishikawa
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Zewen Tao | Shin-nosuke Ishikawa
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Repository-level repair requires not only correct patches but also inspectable records that explain how issue requirements are translated into code changes and post-edit evidence. We contribute THEMIS, a stage-aware repair workflow that externalizes this requirement-to-repair process through semantic interpretation, a runtime requirement–code graph, graph-derived Developer guidance, retained repair rationale and patches, and post-edit audit records. A retrospective audit of 300 SWE-bench Lite cases demonstrates that these artifacts provide broad support for cross-stage inspection: a complete Developer rationale is available for 288 cases, and 214 cases (71.3%) retain a complete audited field set connecting the selected stages. The retained records further enable systematic measurement of cross-stage correspondence: target symbols recur in 62.6% of Developer rationales and in 62.8% of patches, rising to 75.8% when related symbols are included. In a paired 100-case comparison, the relational workflow resolves 19 cases versus 9 for the direct same-input condition, corresponding to a 10-percentage-point improvement. Together, these results show that THEMIS turns otherwise implicit requirement-to-repair transitions into observable traces, enabling systematic inspection of how repair decisions persist, align, and evolve across stages.