LLM-Based Detection of Tangled Code Changes for Higher-Quality Method-Level Bug Datasets

Abstract: Tangled code changes-commits that conflate unrelated modifications such as bug fixes, refactorings, and enhancements-introduce significant noise into bug datasets and adversely affect the performance of bug prediction models. Addressing this issue at a fine-grained, method-level granularity remains underexplored. This is critical to address, as recent bug prediction models, driven by practitioner demand, are increasingly focusing on finer granularity rather than traditional class- or file-level predictions. This study investigates the utility of LLMs for detecting tangled code changes by leveraging both commit messages and method-level code diffs. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and evaluate multiple prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting, using state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash. Our results demonstrate that combining commit messages with code diffs significantly enhances model performance, with the combined few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting achieving an F1-score of 0.88. Additionally, we explore embedding-based machine learning models trained on LLM-generated embeddings, where a multi-layer perceptron classifier achieves superior performance (F1-score: 0.906, MCC: 0.807). These findings are encouraging for the research community, as method-level bug prediction remains an open research problem, largely due to the lack of noise-free bug datasets. This research not only contributes a novel method-level perspective to the untangling problem but also highlights practical avenues for enhancing automated software quality assessment tools.