Behavioral Regression Detection for Pull Requests via Structured Oracles

Overview & Synopsis

Software regressions are unintended behavioral changes introduced by code modifications and are hard to detect at pull-request (PR) level. Existing methods rely on incomplete tests or directly analyze PRs via LLMs, lacking structured behavioral reasoning and explicit oracles. We present ORION, a staged framework for PR-level regression detection. ORION extracts PR intent and identifies impacted functions via AST-based impact analysis, then synthesizes function-level structured behavioral oracles encoding preserved/changed behaviors, setup constraints and control-flow hints from PR intent, static risk signals and code changes. Guided by these oracles, ORION generates executable tests, conducts oracle-coverage-guided augmentation and static repair, and differentially runs tests on pre- and post-change code. It classifies PRs with deterministic rules and constrained LLM reasoning. We build RegBench-Py, the first Python PR regression benchmark with 154 verified real-world PRs. ORION achieves F1-scores of 0.6125 (DeepSeek-Chat-V3.2) and 0.5578 (Claude-4.5-haiku), outperforming baselines including Testora, Codex and Claude Code. Compared with PatchGuru, ORION supports broader multi-function PRs while remaining competitive on single-function cases. On 1,459 merged PRs, ORION finds 9 reproducible regression candidates, 8 confirmed by maintainers. It takes ~15 minutes per PR, showing practicality for CI/CD screening.