PredicateFix: Repairing Static Analysis Alerts with Bridging Predicates

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to fix static analysis alerts in program code is becoming increasingly popular and helpful. However, these models often have the problem of hallucination and perform poorly for complex and less common alerts, limiting their performance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to solve this problem by providing the model with a relevant example, but the unsatisfactory quality of such examples challenges the effectiveness of existing approaches. To address this challenge, this paper utilizes the predicates in the analysis rule, which can serve as a bridge between the alert and relevant code snippets within a clean code corpus, called key examples. Based on the above insight, we propose an algorithm to retrieve key examples for an alert automatically. Then, we build PredicateFix as a RAG pipeline to fix alerts flagged by the CodeQL code checker and another imperative static analyzer for Golang. Evaluation with multiple LLMs shows that PredicateFix increases the number of correct repairs by 27.1% ~ 72.5%, significantly outperforming other baseline RAG approaches.