English
Related papers

Related papers: Symbolic Execution Game Semantics

200 papers

Control flow in unstructured programs can be complex and dynamic, which makes static analysis difficult. Yet, automated reasoning about unstructured control flow is important when certifying properties of binary (machine) code in…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Andreas Lindner , Karl Palmskog , Scott Constable , Mads Dam , Roberto Guanciale , Hamed Nemati

Memory corruption is a serious class of software vulnerabilities, which requires careful attention to be detected and removed from applications before getting exploited and harming the system users. Symbolic execution is a well-known method…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Sara Baradaran , Mahdi Heidari , Ali Kamali , Maryam Mouzarani

We present a Bounded Model Checking technique for higher-order programs. The vehicle of our study is a higher-order calculus with general references. Our technique is a symbolic state syntactical translation based on SMT solvers, adapted to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-04-06 Yu-Yang Lin , Nikos Tzevelekos

As large language models (LLMs) excel at code reasoning, a natural question arises: can an LLM execute programs (i.e., act as an interpreter) purely based on a programming language's formal semantics? If so, it will enable rapid prototyping…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Aditya Thimmaiah , Jiyang Zhang , Jayanth Srinivasa , Junyi Jessy Li , Milos Gligoric

Software testing research has traditionally relied on closed-world assumptions, such as finite state spaces, reproducible executions, and stable test oracles. However, many modern software systems operate under uncertainty, non-determinism,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Yusaku Kato , Norihiro Yoshida , Erina Makihara , Katsuro Inoue

Existing support for regular expressions in automated test generation or verification tools is lacking. Common aspects of regular expression engines found in mainstream programming languages, such as backreferences or greedy matching, are…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Blake Loring , Duncan Mitchell , Johannes Kinder

Learning to solve long horizon temporally extended tasks with reinforcement learning has been a challenge for several years now. We believe that it is important to leverage both the hierarchical structure of complex tasks and to use expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Bharat Prakash , Nicholas Waytowich , Tim Oates , Tinoosh Mohsenin

Game semantics aim at describing the interactive behaviour of proofs by interpreting formulas as games on which proofs induce strategies. In this article, we introduce a game semantics for a fragment of first order propositional logic. One…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2008-12-18 Samuel Mimram

Code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in modern software development, enhancing productivity and accelerating development. This paper aims to investigate the fine-tuning of code-generating LLMs using…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Marina Sakharova , Abhinav Anand , Mira Mezini

Symbolic execution has shown its ability to find security-relevant flaws in software, but faces significant scalability challenges. There is a commonly held belief that manual intervention by an expert can help alleviate these limiting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-10 John Galea , Sean Heelan , Daniel Neville , Daniel Kroening

In this paper, we study the complexity of execution in higher-order programming languages. Our study has two facets: on the one hand we give an upper bound to the length of interactions between bounded P-visible strategies in Hyland-Ong…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-01-11 Pierre Clairambault

In recent years, compositional symbolic execution (CSE) tools have been growing in prominence and are becoming more and more applicable to real-world codebases. Still to this day, however, debugging the output of these tools remains…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Nat Karmios , Sacha-Élie Ayoun , Philippa Gardner

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Hernán Ponce-de-León , Johannes Kinder

Interaction languages such as MSC are often associated with formal semantics by means of translations into distinct behavioral formalisms such as automatas or Petri nets. In contrast to translational approaches we propose an operational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-05-08 Erwan Mahe , Christophe Gaston , Pascale Le Gall

We present SymNet, a network static analysis tool based on symbolic execution. SymNet quickly analyzes networks by injecting symbolic packets and tracing their path through the network. Our key novelty is SEFL, a language we designed for…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2016-04-12 Radu Stoenescu , Matei Popovici , Lorina Negreanu , Costin Raiciu

Operational semantics has established itself as a flexible but rigorous means to describe the meaning of programming languages. Oftentimes, it is felt necessary to keep a semantics small, for example to facilitate its use for model checking…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Benjamin Morandi , Sebastian Nanz , Bertrand Meyer

\emph{Literate programming}, introduced by Knurth, interleaves code and prose so that a program can be read as both executable and explanatory text. We propose \emph{literate execution}, which inverts this relationship: rather than…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Joe Bond , Jacob Pake , Cristina David , Andrew McNutt , Trevor Sseguya Muwonge , Dominic Orchard , Roly Perera

The effectiveness of concolic testing deteriorates as the size of programs increases. A promising way out is to test programs modularly, e.g., on a per function or class basis. Alas, this idea hits a roadblock in modern programming…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Shu-Hung You , Robert Bruce Findler , Christos Dimoulas

We present SEIF, a methodology that combines static analysis with symbolic execution to verify and explicate information flow paths in a hardware design. SEIF begins with a statically built model of the information flow through a design and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Kaki Ryan , Matthew Gregoire , Cynthia Sturton

Given a natural language instruction and an input scene, our goal is to train a model to output a manipulation program that can be executed by the robot. Prior approaches for this task possess one of the following limitations: (i) rely on…