English
Related papers

Related papers: Speculative Symbolic Execution

200 papers

We present a generalisation of King's symbolic execution technique called compact symbolic execution. It is based on a concept of templates: a template is a declarative parametric description of such a program part, generating paths in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2012-01-31 Marek Trtík

We present a generalisation of King's symbolic execution technique called compact symbolic execution. It proceeds in two steps. First, we analyse cyclic paths in the control flow graph of a given program, independently from the rest of the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2013-09-18 Jiří Slabý , Jan Strejček , Marek Trtík

Symbolic regression is a powerful system identification technique in industrial scenarios where no prior knowledge on model structure is available. Such scenarios often require specific model properties such as interpretability, robustness,…

Automatically generating formal specifications including loop invariants, preconditions, and postconditions for legacy code is critical for program understanding, reuse and verification. However, the inherent complexity of control and data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Fanpeng Yang , Xu Ma , Shuling Wang , Xiong Xu , Qinxiang Cao , Naijun Zhan , Xiaofeng Li , Bin Gu

Symbolic execution is a program analysis technique commonly utilized to determine whether programs violate properties and, in case violations are found, to generate inputs that can trigger them. Used in the context of security properties…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-01-20 Ignacio Tiraboschi , Tamara Rezk , Xavier Rival

We study the problem of learning worst-case-safe parameters for programs that use neural networks as well as symbolic, human-written code. Such neurosymbolic programs arise in many safety-critical domains. However, because they can use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Chenxi Yang , Swarat Chaudhuri

Symbolic execution is a technique which enables automatically generating test inputs (and outputs) exercising a set of execution paths within a program to be tested. If the paths cover a sufficient part of the code under test, the test data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-01-22 Michaël Marcozzi , Wim Vanhoof , Jean-Luc Hainaut

Designing optimal prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) is a complicated and resource-intensive task, often requiring substantial human expertise and effort. Existing approaches typically separate the optimization of prompt instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Wendi Cui , Zhuohang Li , Hao Sun , Damien Lopez , Kamalika Das , Bradley Malin , Sricharan Kumar , Jiaxin Zhang

Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Kaki Ryan , Cynthia Sturton

We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Phuc C. Nguyen , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as an effective technique to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. However, the achievable speedup largely depends on the effectiveness of the drafting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Fang , Zhihui Fu , Qibin Zhao , Jun Wang

Symbolic execution is a program analysis technique executing programs with symbolic instead of concrete inputs. This principle allows for exploring many program paths at once. Despite its wide adoption -- in particular for program testing…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Arthur Correnson , Dominic Steinhoefel

We introduce a novel technique for finding real errors in programs. The technique is based on a synergy of three well-known methods: metacompilation, slicing, and symbolic execution. More precisely, we instrument a given program with a code…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2012-01-24 Jiří Slabý , Jan Strejček , Marek Trtík

We describe a technique for systematic testing of multi-threaded programs. We combine Quasi-Optimal Partial-Order Reduction, a state-of-the-art technique that tackles path explosion due to interleaving non-determinism, with symbolic…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Daniel Schemmel , Julian Büning , César Rodríguez , David Laprell , Klaus Wehrle

Static analysis is the analysis of a program without executing it, usually carried out by an automated tool. Symbolic execution is a popular static analysis technique used both in program verification and in bug detection software. It works…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Gabor Horvath , Reka Kovacs , Zoltan Porkolab

Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) is a key technique in program analysis, widely used in software testing, vulnerability discovery, and formal verification. In distributed AI systems, DSE plays a crucial role in identifying hard-to-detect…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ruoxi Wang , Kun Li , Minghui Xu , Yue Zhang , Kaidi Xu , Chunchi Liu , Yinhao Xiao , Xiuzhen Cheng

Modern processors employ different prediction mechanisms to speculate over different kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these prediction mechanisms simultaneously in order to trigger leaks about speculatively-accessed data. Thus,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Xaver Fabian , Marco Guarnieri , Marco Patrignani

In previous work, we presented a symbolic execution method which starts with a concrete model of the program but progressively abstracts away details only when these are known to be irrelevant using interpolation. In this paper, we extend…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2011-03-11 Joxan Jaffar , Jorge A. Navas , Andrew E. Santosa

Symbolic execution now becomes an indispensable technique for software testing and program analysis. There are several symbolic execution tools available off-the-shelf, and we need a practical benchmark approach to learn their capabilities.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Hui Xu , Zirui Zhao , Yangfan Zhou , Michael R. Lyu

Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) suffers from the path explosion problem when the target program has many conditional branches. The classical approach for managing the path explosion problem is dynamic state merging. Dynamic state merging…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Charitha Saumya , Muhammad Hassan , Rohan Gangaraju , Milind Kulkarni , Kirshanthan Sundararajah