Learning to Predict Code Review Rounds in Modern Code Review Using Multi-Objective Genetic Programming
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Code review is an essential practice for software quality assurance. However, code review can be cumbersome as patches often undergo multiple rounds to fix bugs, enforce coding standards, and improve structure before merging or abandonment. Predicting the number of review rounds can help developers prioritize tasks and streamline the process. Existing machine learning models for review round prediction suffer from key limitations. Their black-box nature makes them difficult to interpret, reducing trust and adoption. Additionally, they rely on data re-balancing techniques that introduce artificial points, causing concept shifts and reducing reliability. To address these issues, we propose MORRP, a novel Multi-Objective Review Rounds Prediction approach. MORRP is based on Multi-Objective Genetic Programming (MOGP) to predict review rounds. Our method evolves interpretable models while optimizing precision, recall, and specificity without relying on data re-balancing. We evaluate our approach on three large open-source projects: Eclipse, OpenDaylight, and OpenStack. Results show that MORRP achieves competitive performance, with a micro F1 score between 0.65 and 0.75, outperforming complex ML models like Random Forest and LightGBM.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it