AutoCodeRover does not require or assume a unit test to generate patches. The results discussed in Section 6.1 of the ArXiv paper are generated without any unit test. The unit tests are used by SWE-bench, when evaluating the correctness of AutoCodeRover-generated patches.

That being said, when some unit tests are available (either written by developers or with assistance from other tools), AutoCodeRover can make use of them to perform some analysis like Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL). This kind of analysis output can help the agent in pinpointing locations to fix. (Please see Section 6.2 for the analysis on SBFL.)