DiffuTester: Accelerating Unit Test Generation for Diffusion LLMs via Mining Structural Pattern

Abstract:Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) enable parallel generation and are promising for unit test generation (UTG), where efficient and large-scale automated testing is essential in software development. Despite this advantage, their application to UTG is still constrained by a clear trade-off between efficiency and test quality, since increasing the number of tokens generated in each step often causes a sharp decline in the quality of test cases. To overcome this limitation, we present DiffuTester, an acceleration framework specifically tailored for dLLMs in UTG. The motivation of DiffuTester is that unit tests targeting the same focal method often share structural patterns. DiffuTester employs a novel structural pattern based decoding approach, which dynamically identifies structural patterns across unit tests through their abstract syntax trees and additionally decodes the corresponding tokens, thereby achieving acceleration without compromising the quality of the output. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we extend the original TestEval benchmark to three programming languages. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks with two representative models show that DiffuTester delivers significant acceleration while preserving test coverage. Moreover, DiffuTester generalizes well across different dLLMs and programming languages, providing a practical and scalable solution for efficient UTG in software development. Code and data are publicly available at this https URL.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2509.24975 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2509.24975v4 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.24975 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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