Paper Detail

MM-IssueLoc: A Controlled Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Evidence in Multimodal Repository-Level Issue Localization

Shaoxiong Zhan, Shi Hu, Boyu Feng, Hai Lin, Andrew Gong, Zhengda Zhou, Jiaying Zhou, Yunyun Hou, Hao Su, Hai-Tao Zheng

arxiv Score 18.2

Published 2026-07-16 · First seen 2026-07-17

General AI

Abstract

Real repository issues routinely include visual evidence such as screenshots, error dialogs, rendered UI states, and logs, yet repository-level issue localization is evaluated mostly as a text-only task. Existing multimodal SE benchmarks evaluate end-to-end repair, entangling localization with patch synthesis and obscuring whether visual input helped, hurt, or was ignored. We introduce \textbf{MM-IssueLoc}, a controlled benchmark and evaluation protocol for repository-level localization with visual evidence. MM-IssueLoc contains 652 issue-PR instances across 23 languages, with annotations for 7 image categories and 4 relevance levels. It provides file-level and function-level gold labels, paired text-only and with-image evaluation, and VCE-based diagnostics that convert images into structured textual evidence. We evaluate LLM-based and retrieval-based systems, including MM-IssueLoc-VL-Emb as a controlled multimodal retriever. Results show that existing systems remain far from reliable multimodal repository localization: the strongest agent reaches 38.96 file Acc@5 and 22.45 function Acc@10, while the strongest retriever reaches 33.86 function Acc@10. Cross-benchmark comparisons show that high localization scores on text-dominant SWE benchmarks do not transfer cleanly to multimodal issue localization. MM-IssueLoc turns visual evidence into an explicit evaluation variable, enabling future work to test whether systems improve by using visual evidence for localization, rather than by relying on text-only cues or downstream patch-generation effects.

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BibTeX

@article{zhan2026mm,
  title = {MM-IssueLoc: A Controlled Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Evidence in Multimodal Repository-Level Issue Localization},
  author = {Shaoxiong Zhan and Shi Hu and Boyu Feng and Hai Lin and Andrew Gong and Zhengda Zhou and Jiaying Zhou and Yunyun Hou and Hao Su and Hai-Tao Zheng},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Real repository issues routinely include visual evidence such as screenshots, error dialogs, rendered UI states, and logs, yet repository-level issue localization is evaluated mostly as a text-only task. Existing multimodal SE benchmarks evaluate end-to-end repair, entangling localization with patch synthesis and obscuring whether visual input helped, hurt, or was ignored. We introduce \textbackslash{}textbf\{MM-IssueLoc\}, a controlled benchmark and evaluation protocol for repository-level localization with vis},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15205},
  keywords = {cs.SE, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2607.15205},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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