OrcaLoca: An LLM Agent Framework for Software Issue Localization

1University of California, San Diego, 2Intel Corporation
* Equal contribution
OrcaLoca Overview figure

OrcaLoca execution demo on a github issue example.

Abstract

Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM) agents are revolutionizing Autonomous Software Engineering (ASE), enabling automated coding, problem fixes, and feature improvements. However, localization -- precisely identifying software problems by navigating to relevant code sections -- remains a significant challenge. Current approaches often yield suboptimal results due to a lack of effective integration between LLM agents and precise code search mechanisms. This paper introduces OrcaLoca, an LLM agent framework that improves accuracy for software issue localization by integrating priority-based scheduling for LLM-guided action, action decomposition with relevance scoring, and distance-aware context pruning. Experimental results demonstrate that OrcaLoca becomes the new open-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) in function match rate (65.33%) on SWE-bench Lite. It also improves the final resolved rate of an open-source framework by 6.33 percentage points through its patch generation integration.

BibTeX

@article{yu2025orcaloca,
  title={OrcaLoca: An LLM Agent Framework for Software Issue Localization},
  author={Yu, Zhongming and Zhang, Hejia and Zhao, Yujie and Huang, Hanxian and Yao, Matrix and Ding, Ke and Zhao, Jishen},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.00350},
  year={2025}
}