LLPut: Investigating Large Language Models for Bug Report-Based Input Generation

Abstract: Failure-inducing inputs play a crucial role in diagnosing and analyzing software bugs. Bug reports typically contain these inputs, which developers extract to facilitate debugging. Since bug reports are written in natural language, prior research has leveraged various NLP techniques for automated input extraction. With the advent of LLMs, an important research question arises: how effectively can generative LLMs extract failure-inducing inputs from bug reports? In this paper, we propose LLPut, a technique to empirically evaluate the performance of three open-source generative LLMs -- LLaMA, Qwen, and Qwen-Coder -- in extracting relevant inputs from bug reports. We conduct an experimental evaluation on a dataset of 206 bug reports to assess the accuracy and effectiveness of these models. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities and limitations of generative LLMs in automated bug diagnosis.