6^th International Workshop on Automated Program Repair (APR 2025)

Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of works on automated program repair in various scientific communities including software engineering, programming languages, formal methods and artificial intelligence. This growth has culminated in successful deployments of program repair in industry. Despite these considerable advances, program repair still faces fundamental technological and societal challenges. This workshop will create an opportunity for the research community to coordinate its effort for addressing these challenges, share recent ideas and results, and formulate an agenda for future research.

Keynotes

Call for Papers

We invite submissions that discuss recent developments in the theory and practice of automated program repair. The workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers interested in program repair to exchange ideas and find out about current research directions in the field. A particular emphasis of this workshop is on reducing the gap between academic research on automated program repair and the demands of industry.

This workshop will explore topics related to:

• Quality of automatically generated patches, overfitting analysis
• Scalability of program repair algorithms
• Repair of domain-specific bugs
• Applications of program repair
• Deployment of program repair
• Case studies on program repair
• Program repair tools
• Program repair benchmarks
• Dynamic and static analysis for program repair
• Machine learning of code for program repair
• Testing and verification for program repair
• Fault localization for program repair
• Program repair and DevOps
• Debugging and program repair
• Program synthesis for program repair

Evaluation Criteria

Reviewers will evaluate each contribution for its soundness, significance, novelty, verifiability, and clarity. Submissions should clearly state how they are novel and how they improve upon existing work.

We will employ a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person.

Submission Instructions

All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2025 formatting and submission instructions. All submissions must be in PDF. We invite submissions of papers of the following types:

• Research papers + optional ASEJ extensions (up to 8 pages inc. references): technical research, experience reports, empirical studies, etc.
• Position papers (up to 4 pages inc. references): well-argued position or work in progress.

Note that submitting shorter papers, e.g. a two-page position paper, is acceptable. The reviewers will be instructed not to evaluate submissions based on their length, but only on their quality.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Submissions can be made via the submission site by the submission deadline. We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-blind reviewing. If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the workshop and present the paper in person.

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by IEEE. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Journal Submission Instructions

The Special Issue on Automated Program Repair in the ASE Journal (ASEJ) is organised in coordination with the International Workshop on Automated Program Repair (APR) 2025. In the workshop round, the authors will submit papers to HotCRP. Each accepted submission must be accompanied by a registration of at least one author and presented at APR 2025. The selected papers from the APR workshop will be invited to submit their revisions to the Automated Software Engineering journal. Note this is a close call only for the participants of the APR workshop, and we do not allow new submission for the journal round.

In order for your paper to be considered for publication in ASEJ, you need to provide a cover letter describing the planned journal extension. The journal version needs to contain some new, albeit not necessary very significant, information, such as a description of a new experiment or a case study. Note that only the research papers (not short position papers) will be considered for publication in the journal. If you paper is selected for the journal round, you need to carefully address the comments from the workshop reviewers, extend the paper as described in the cover letter, and prepare a detailed response letter. The revised and extended papers will be reviewed by the same reviewers.