CIVER: Causal Intervention Verification for Reliable Code Review

Abstract

Code review is essential for maintaining software repositories by identifying defects, improving code quality, and supporting reliable software evolution. With the growing adoption of LLM-based coding agents, an increasing number of code contributions and repository changes are generated by these agents. Consequently, LLM-based code review agents are becoming increasingly prevalent to evaluate these contributions and maintain software quality. However, LLM reviewers often generate lengthy reviews containing numerous potential issues, many of which are false positives or lack sufficient evidence. These unreliable reviews can mislead developers and downstream coding agents, motivating the need to distinguish actionable findings from unsupported claims. We propose CIVER, a causal intervention-based framework that identifies the core issues underlying code-review findings and distinguishes genuine defects from false positives. CIVER integrates three modules: a review module assesses findings, an intervention module generates repair-oriented perturbations, and a verifier module scores review reliability. Through joint optimization via expert iteration, the three modules identify genuine defects by responding to targeted repairs while remaining stable under unrelated changes. Extensive experiments on SWE-Review-Bench demonstrate that CIVER correctly identifies 77% of genuine defects through targeted repairs. Cross-project and downstream repair evaluations further demonstrate that CIVER generalizes across repositories and improves coding agents' task success rates, highlighting its effectiveness for reliable automated code review.