From Codebase to Culprit (C2C): Reducing the Search Space for Bugs with Semantic Retrieval and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.38402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce C2C (From Codebase to Culprit), a framework for precise bug localization that progressively reduces the debugging search space across multiple levels of granularity: files, functions, and lines of code. To mirror developer's natural top-down debugging workflows, C2C integrates semantic retrieval and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) in a two-stage process. First, it performs recall-oriented retrieval of buggy candidates via s