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Related papers: Specification Inference for Evolving Systems

200 papers

The increasing complexity of modern system-on-chip designs amplifies hardware security risks and makes manual security property specification a major bottleneck in formal property verification. This paper presents Assertain, an automated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Shams Tarek , Dipayan Saha , Khan Thamid Hasan , Sujan Kumar Saha , Mark Tehranipoor , Farimah Farahmandi

Unit tests often lack concise summaries that convey test intent, especially in auto-generated or poorly documented codebases. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anamul Haque Mollah , Ahmed Aljohani , Hyunsook Do

Active Test-Time Adaptation (ATTA) improves model robustness under domain shift by selectively querying human annotations at deployment, but existing methods use heuristic uncertainty measures and suffer from low data selection efficiency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Tingyu Shi , Fan Lyu , Shaoliang Peng

Background. Developers spend more time fixing bugs and refactoring the code to increase the maintainability than developing new features. Researchers investigated the code quality impact on fault-proneness focusing on code smells and code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Francesco Lomio , Sergio Moreschini , Valentina Lenarduzzi

Feature attribution is a fundamental task in both machine learning and data analysis, which involves determining the contribution of individual features or variables to a model's output. This process helps identify the most important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Jinfeng Zhong , Elsa Negre

Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-29 H. Femmer , D. Méndez Fernández , S. Wagner , S. Eder

A code change pattern represents a kind of recurrent modification in software. For instance, a known code change pattern consists of the change of the conditional expression of an if statement. Previous work has identified different change…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Matias Martinez , Laurence Duchien , Martin Monperrus

We present ABETS, an assertion-based, dynamic analyzer that helps diagnose errors in Maude programs. ABETS uses slicing to automatically create reduced versions of both a run's execution trace and executed program, reduced versions in which…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2016-08-05 M. Alpuente , D. Ballis , F. Frechina , J. Sapiña

As any scientific discipline, the software engineering (SE) research community strives to contribute to the betterment of the target population of our research: software producers and consumers. We will only achieve this betterment if we…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Julian Frattini , Hans-Martin Heyn , Robert Feldt , Richard Torkar

Software fault prediction (SFP) is a critical task in software engineering, enabling early identification of faults in modules to improve software quality and reduce maintenance costs. This research investigates the combined effects of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ahmad Nauman Ghazi , Nagajyothi Devarapalli , Ashir Javeed , Sadi Alawadi , Fahed Alkhabbas , Khalid AlKharabsheh

Dynamic model inference techniques have been the center of many research projects recently. There are now multiple open source implementations of state-of-the-art algorithms, which provide basic abstraction and merging capabilities. Most of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-01 Mohammad Jafar Mashhadi , Hadi Hemmati

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

Diversity is prevalent in modern software systems. Several system variants exist at the same time in order to adapt to changing user requirements. Additionally, software systems evolve over time in order to adjust to unanticipated changes…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-09-09 Arne Haber , Holger Renel , Bernhard Rumpe , Ina Schaefer

The Invariant Refinement Method for Self Adaptation (IRM-SA) is a design method targeting development of smart Cyber-Physical Systems (sCPS). It allows for a systematic translation of the system requirements into the system architecture…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Jiri Vinarek , Petr Hnetynka

Recent work pairs LLMs with evolutionary search to iteratively generate, modify, and select code using task-specific feedback. These systems have produced strong results in mathematical discovery and algorithm design, yet a fundamental…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Nico Pelleriti , Sree Harsha Nelaturu , Zhanke Zhou , Zongze Li , Max Zimmer , Bo Han , Sebastian Pokutta

LLM-driven evolutionary systems have shown promise for automated science discovery, yet existing approaches such as AlphaEvolve rely on full-code histories that are context-inefficient and potentially provide weak evolutionary guidance. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Jiachen Jiang , Tianyu Ding , Zhihui Zhu

Hardware-software contracts are abstract specifications of a CPU's leakage behavior. They enable verifying the security of high-level programs against side-channel attacks without having to explicitly reason about the microarchitectural…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Arthur Correnson , Haoyi Zeng , Jana Hofmann

The use of asserts in code has received increasing attention in the software engineering community in the past few years, even though it has been a recognized programming construct for many decades. A previous empirical study by Casalnuovo…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Steve Counsell , Tracy Hall , Thomas Shippey , David Bowes , Amjed Tahir , Stephen MacDonell

Logical specifications have been shown to help reinforcement learning algorithms in achieving complex tasks. However, when a task is under-specified, agents might fail to learn useful policies. In this work, we explore the possibility of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Tanmay Ambadkar , Đorđe Žikelić , Abhinav Verma

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Lei Chen , Michele Lanza , Shinpei Hayashi