Related papers: Specification and Inference of Trace Refinement Re…

We address the safety verification and synthesis problems for real-time systems. We introduce real-time programs that are made of instructions that can perform assignments to discrete and real-valued variables. They are general enough to…

Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…

Software traceability establishes and leverages associations between diverse development artifacts. Researchers have proposed the use of deep learning trace models to link natural language artifacts, such as requirements and issue…

Relational verification encompasses information flow security, regression verification, translation validation for compilers, and more. Effective alignment of the programs and computations to be related facilitates use of simpler relational…

Relational program verification is a variant of program verification where one can reason about two programs and as a special case about two executions of a single program on different inputs. Relational program verification can be used for…

Trace theory is a principled framework for defining equivalence relations for concurrent program runs based on a commutativity relation over the set of atomic steps taken by individual program threads. Its simplicity, elegance, and…

The problem of checking whether two programs are semantically equivalent or not has a diverse range of applications, and is consequently of substantial importance. There are several techniques that address this problem, chiefly by…

Relational properties arise in many settings: relating two versions of a program that use different data representations, noninterference properties for security, etc. The main ingredient of relational verification, relating aligned pairs…

The existence of trace links between artifacts of the software development life cycle can improve the efficiency of many activities during software development, maintenance and operations. Unfortunately, the creation and maintenance of…

Recent advances in reasoning-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces - intermediate reasoning steps generated before a final answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek R1, guide inference and train…

We present an expressive logic over trace formulas, based on binary state predicates, chop, and least fixed-points, for precise specification of programs with recursive procedures. Both, programs and trace formulas, are equipped with a…

Previous studies have shown that software traceability, the ability to link together related artifacts from different sources within a project (e.g., source code, use cases, documentation, etc.), improves project outcomes by assisting…

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for automating documentation-to-code traceability, yet their capabilities remain underexplored. We present a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and o3-mini) in…

Traceability is a fundamental component of the modern software development process that helps to ensure properly functioning, secure programs. Due to the high cost of manually establishing trace links, researchers have developed automated…

Traces are used to show whether a model complies with the intended behavior. A modeler can use trace checking to ensure the preservation of the model behavior during the refinement process. In this paper, we present a trace refinement…

Software development relies heavily on traceability links between various software artifacts to ensure quality and facilitate maintenance. While automated traceability recovery techniques have advanced for different artifact pairs, the…

Getting language models to reason correctly about code requires training on data where each reasoning step can be checked. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by…

The CEGAR loop in software model checking notoriously diverges when the abstraction refinement procedure does not derive a loop invariant. An abstraction refinement procedure based on an SMT solver is applied to a trace, i.e., a restricted…

Software is now ubiquitous and involved in complex interactions with the human users and the physical world in so-called cyber-physical systems where the management of time is a major issue. Separation of concerns is a key asset in the…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We…