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The rapid growth of applying Machine Learning (ML) in different domains, especially in safety-critical areas, increases the need for reliable ML components, i.e., a software component operating based on ML. Since corrective maintenance, i.e. identifying and resolving systems bugs, is a key task in the software development process to deliver reliable software components, it is necessary to investigate the usage of ML components, from the software maintenance perspective. Understanding the bugs’ characteristics and maintenance challenges in ML-based systems can help developers of these systems to identify where to focus maintenance and testing efforts, by giving insights into the most error-prone components, most common bugs, etc. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of bugs in ML-based software systems and the difference between ML and non-ML bugs from the maintenance viewpoint. We …