TreeMind : Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports via LLM-empowered Monte Carlo Tree Search

Automatically reproducing Android app crashes from textual bug reports is challenging, particularly when the reports are incomplete and modern UIs exhibit high combinatorial complexity. Approaches relying on reinforcement learning or large language models (LLMs) struggle to infer missing steps and reconstruct user action sequences in vast UI interaction spaces. We present TreeMind, which integrates LLMs with an adapted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for strategic UI exploration in bug reproduction. TreeMind formulates the reproduction as a target-driven search problem and leverages MCTS to iteratively refine action sequences. To enhance MCTS with semantic reasoning, we introduce two LLM-guided agents: Expander generates promising actions based on the current UI state and exploration history, while Simulator estimates the likelihood that each candidate action leads toward successful reproduction using dynamic environment feedback. With multi-modal UI inputs and tailored prompts, TreeMind performs feedback-aware navigation that identifies essential user actions and incrementally reconstructs reproduction paths. We evaluate TreeMind on 100 Android bug reports, including 90 from three benchmarks and 10 from GitHub. Experimental results show that it outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines in reproduction success rate and average time cost over all runs, suggesting the promise of integrating LLM reasoning with MCTS-based planning for automated bug reproduction.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Published
2026-10-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3860893
Primary Topic
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

TreeMind : Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports via LLM-empowered Monte Carlo Tree Search

Wenchao Huang, Hong Zhong, Zhaoyi Meng, Wansen Wang et al.
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
article

TreeMind : Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports via LLM-empowered Monte Carlo Tree Search

Wenchao Huang, Hong Zhong, Zhaoyi Meng, Wansen Wang, Weisheng S. Zhao, Jie Cui, Yan Xiong, Zhengyu Chen
article en

Abstract

Automatically reproducing Android app crashes from textual bug reports is challenging, particularly when the reports are incomplete and modern UIs exhibit high combinatorial complexity. Approaches relying on reinforcement learning or large language models (LLMs) struggle to infer missing steps and reconstruct user action sequences in vast UI interaction spaces. We present TreeMind, which integrates LLMs with an adapted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for strategic UI exploration in bug reproduction. TreeMind formulates the reproduction as a target-driven search problem and leverages MCTS to iteratively refine action sequences. To enhance MCTS with semantic reasoning, we introduce two LLM-guided agents: Expander generates promising actions based on the current UI state and exploration history, while Simulator estimates the likelihood that each candidate action leads toward successful reproduction using dynamic environment feedback. With multi-modal UI inputs and tailored prompts, TreeMind performs feedback-aware navigation that identifies essential user actions and incrementally reconstructs reproduction paths. We evaluate TreeMind on 100 Android bug reports, including 90 from three benchmarks and 10 from GitHub. Experimental results show that it outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines in reproduction success rate and average time cost over all runs, suggesting the promise of integrating LLM reasoning with MCTS-based planning for automated bug reproduction.

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
University of Science and Technology of China (CN), Anhui University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.

Laika access coming soon