English

Program Structure-aware Language Models: Targeted Software Testing beyond Textual Semantics

Software Engineering 2026-04-21 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent advances in large language models for test case generation have improved branch coverage via prompt-engineered mutations. However, they still lack principled mechanisms for steering models toward specific high-risk execution branches, limiting their effectiveness for discovering subtle bugs and security vulnerabilities. We propose GLMTest, the first program structure-aware LLM framework for targeted test case generation that seamlessly integrates code property graphs and code semantics using a graph neural network and a language model to condition test case generation on execution branches. This structured conditioning enables controllable and branch-targeted test case generation, thereby potentially enhancing bug and security risk discovery. Experiments on real-world projects show that GLMTest built on a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model improves branch accuracy from 27.4% to 50.2% on TestGenEval benchmark compared with state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and GPT-4o-mini.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17715,
  title  = {Program Structure-aware Language Models: Targeted Software Testing beyond Textual Semantics},
  author = {Khang Tran and Khoa Nguyen and Cristian Borcea and NhatHai Phan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17715},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted in The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings 2026)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:17:27.694Z