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Related papers: Synthesizing Specifications

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Automatically generating formal specifications could reduce the effort needed to improve program correctness, but in practice, this is still challenging. Many developers avoid writing contracts by hand, which limits the use of automated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ragib Shahariar Ayon , Shibbir Ahmed

Program synthesis is the task of automatically generating a program consistent with a given specification. A natural way to specify programs is to provide examples of desired input-output behavior, and many current program synthesis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Alexander Suh , Yuval Timen

Our goal is to build systems which write code automatically from the kinds of specifications humans can most easily provide, such as examples and natural language instruction. The key idea of this work is that a flexible combination of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Maxwell Nye , Luke Hewitt , Joshua Tenenbaum , Armando Solar-Lezama

This work is concerned with the generation of formal specifications from code, using Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with symbolic methods. Concretely, in our study, the programming language is C, the specification language is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-01 George Granberry , Wolfgang Ahrendt , Moa Johansson

This paper addresses the problem of creating simplifiers for logic formulas based on conditional term rewriting. In particular, the paper focuses on a program synthesis application where formula simplifications have been shown to have a…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-02-24 Rohit Singh , Armando Solar-Lezama

Formal methods apply algorithms based on mathematical principles to enhance the reliability of systems. It would only be natural to try to progress from verification, model checking or testing a system against its formal specification into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-02-28 Gal Katz , Doron Peled

Despite its many unquestionable benefits, formal specifications are not widely used in industrial software development. In order to reduce the time and effort required to write formal specifications, in this paper we propose a technique for…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2015-12-23 María Alpuente , Daniel Pardo , Alicia Villanueva

Automated testing plays a crucial role in ensuring software security. It heavily relies on formal specifications to validate the correctness of the system behavior. However, the main approach to defining these formal specifications is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Hui Li , Zhen Dong , Siao Wang , Hui Zhang , Liwei Shen , Xin Peng , Dongdong She

Programmers currently enjoy access to a very high number of code repositories and libraries of ever increasing size. The ensuing potential for reuse is however hampered by the fact that searching within all this code becomes an increasingly…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-08-09 Isabel Garcia-Contreras , Jose F. Morales , Manuel V. Hermenegildo

Writing specifications for computer programs is not easy since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge this conceptual gap we propose controlled natural…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Norbert E. Fuchs , Rolf Schwitter

We study LTLf synthesis with multiple properties, where satisfying all properties may be impossible. Instead of enumerating subsets of properties, we compute in one fixed-point computation the relation between product-game states and the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Christoph Weinhuber , Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Moshe Y. Vardi

This paper proposes a technique to help choose the best formal specification candidate among a set of alternatives. Given a set of specifications, our technique generates a suite of test cases that, once classified by the user as desirable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Alcino Cunha , Nuno Macedo

In many scenarios we need to find the most likely program under a local context, where the local context can be an incomplete program, a partial specification, natural language description, etc. We call such problem program estimation. In…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yingfei Xiong , Bo Wang , Guirong Fu , Linfei Zang

Constraint Programming (CP) and Local Search (LS) are different paradigms for dealing with combinatorial search and optimization problems. Their complementary features motivated researchers to create hybrid CP/LS solutions, maintaining both…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-09-19 Mateusz Ślażyński

To equip SL with software properly, we need an input system to represent and manipulate signed contents in the same way that every day software allows to process written text. Refuting the claim that video is good enough a medium to serve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Michael Filhol

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. This paper introduces specification instructions:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo , Benjamin Roth

Reactive synthesis transforms a specification of a reactive system, given in a temporal logic, into an implementation. The main advantage of synthesis is that it is automatic. The main disadvantage is that the implementation is usually very…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Tom Baumeister , Bernd Finkbeiner , Hazem Torfah

Specification synthesis is the process of deriving a model from the input-output traces of a system. It is used extensively in test design, reverse engineering, and system identification. One type of the resulting artifact of this process…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Iman Saberi , Fathiyeh Faghih , Farzad Sobhi Bavil

Semantic properties are domain-specific specification constructs used to augment an existing language with richer semantics. These properties are taken advantage of in system analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Joseph R. Kiniry

We propose a new technique based on program synthesis for automatically generating visualizations from natural language queries. Our method parses the natural language query into a refinement type specification using the intents-and-slots…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Qiaochu Chen , Shankara Pailoor , Celeste Barnaby , Abby Criswell , Chenglong Wang , Greg Durrett , Isil Dillig