Papers › LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization

LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization

12 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.09089archive 2025-07-28

Zhaoling Chen, Xiangru Tang, Gangda Deng, Fang Wu, Jialong Wu, Zhiwei Jiang, Viktor Prasanna, Arman Cohan, Xingyao Wang

Code localization--identifying precisely where in a codebase changes need to be made--is a fundamental yet challenging task in software maintenance. Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code sections. The challenge lies in bridging natural language problem descriptions with the appropriate code elements, often requiring reasoning across hierarchical structures and multiple dependencies. We introduce LocAgent, a framework that addresses code localization through graph-based representation. By parsing codebases into directed heterogeneous graphs, LocAgent creates a lightweight representation that captures code structures (files, classes, functions) and their dependencies (imports, invocations, inheritance), enabling LLM agents to effectively search and locate relevant entities through powerful multi-hop reasoning. Experimental results on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances accuracy in code localization. Notably, our method with the fine-tuned Qwen-2.5-Coder-Instruct-32B model achieves comparable results to SOTA proprietary models at greatly reduced cost (approximately 86% reduction), reaching up to 92.7% accuracy on file-level localization while improving downstream GitHub issue resolution success rates by 12% for multiple attempts (Pass@10). Our code is available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/LocAgent.

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