  A large body of the literature of automated program repair develops
approaches where patches are generated to be validated against an oracle (e.g.,
a test suite). Because such an oracle can be imperfect, the generated patches,
although validated by the oracle, may actually be incorrect. While the state of
the art explore research directions that require dynamic information or rely on
manually-crafted heuristics, we study the benefit of learning code
representations to learn deep features that may encode the properties of patch
correctness. Our work mainly investigates different representation learning
approaches for code changes to derive embeddings that are amenable to
similarity computations. We report on findings based on embeddings produced by
pre-trained and re-trained neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate
the potential of embeddings to empower learning algorithms in reasoning about
patch correctness: a machine learning predictor with BERT transformer-based
embeddings associated with logistic regression yielded an AUC value of about
0.8 in predicting patch correctness on a deduplicated dataset of 1000 labeled
patches. Our study shows that learned representations can lead to reasonable
performance when comparing against the state-of-the-art, PATCH-SIM, which
relies on dynamic information. These representations may further be
complementary to features that were carefully (manually) engineered in the
literature.
