SPLASH 2026
Sun 4 - Fri 9 October 2026 Oakland, California, United States
co-located with SPLASH/ISSTA 2026
Mon 5 Oct 2026 11:24 - 11:42 at East Hall 1 - Debugging and Fault Localization Chair(s): Alastair F. Donaldson

Bayesian reasoning has emerged as a promising approach to fault localization, where the introduction of errors and their subsequent propagation through faulty executions is treated as a stochastic process. One can then perform Bayesian inference on a probabilistic model encoding the program execution to associate individual statements and values with a posterior probability of being erroneous. In this paper, we propose a new graph representation that effectively models error propagation through failing program executions. This structure, which we call the Error Propagation Graph (EPG), extends prior probabilistic approaches by incorporating richer inter-procedural relationships and accounting for the influence of unexplored control-flow branches that may affect variable values. We also show how EPGs can be constructed efficiently and compactly, and how this structure enables the selection of a set of counterfactual experiments, each involving artificially flipping a suspicious branch predicate at runtime and observing its downstream effect on the test outcome. The results of these experiments provide additional evidence that can be incorporated into the EPG to confirm or refute the model's initial suspiciousness estimates. We have implemented this technique in a tool named Prosecutor and evaluated it on 470 buggy versions of 13 projects from the Defects4J benchmark suite. Our experimental evaluation shows that Prosecutor places 40% of the true fault locations within its top-3 predictions. The technique also significantly outperforms a diverse set of baselines by identifying at least 10%, 11%, 15%, and 19% more buggy statements than each of the baselines in its top-1, top-3, top-5, and top-10 predictions, respectively.

Mon 5 Oct

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

10:30 - 12:00
Debugging and Fault LocalizationOOPSLA at East Hall 1
Chair(s): Alastair F. Donaldson Imperial College London
10:30
18m
Talk
Debugging Debugging Information using Dynamic Call Trees
OOPSLA
J. Ryan Stinnett King's College London, Stephen Kell King's College London
DOI Pre-print
10:48
18m
Talk
Automated Debugging of Datalog ProgramsDistinguished Paper
OOPSLA
Jiashen Wei Nanjing University, Baoyuan Luo Nanjing University, Runshuo Xie Nanjing University, Yun Qi Nanjing University, Yiyu Zhang Nanjing University, Xizao Wang Nanjing University, Xintao Niu Nanjing University, Zhiqiang Zuo Nanjing University
Link to publication DOI
11:06
18m
Talk
Accurate Residues for Floating-Point Debugging
OOPSLA
Yumeng He University of Utah, Pavel Panchekha University of Utah
DOI
11:24
18m
Talk
Prosecutor: Bayesian Counterfactual Fault Localization
OOPSLA
Sara Baradaran University of Southern California, Yifei Huang University of Southern California, Wei Le Iowa State University, Mukund Raghothaman University of Southern California
DOI
11:42
18m
Talk
Specy: Learning Specifications for Distributed Systems from Event Traces
OOPSLA
Mike He Princeton University, Ankush Desai Snowflake, Aishwarya Jagarapu Amazon Web Services, Doug Terry LinkedIn, Sharad Malik Princeton University, Aarti Gupta Princeton University
DOI Pre-print