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Related papers: LExecutor: Learning-Guided Execution

200 papers

This work addresses test output prediction, a key challenge in test case generation. To improve the reliability of predicted outputs by LLMs, prior approaches generate code first to ground predictions. One grounding strategy is direct…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hojae Han , Jaejin Kim , Seung-won Hwang , Yu Jin Kim , Moontae Lee

Semantic parsing aims at translating natural language (NL) utterances onto machine-interpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment. The expensive annotation of utterance-program pairs has long been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Bailin Wang , Mirella Lapata , Ivan Titov

Automated AI research holds great potential to accelerate scientific discovery. However, current LLMs often generate plausible-looking but ineffective ideas. Execution grounding may help, but it is unclear whether automated execution is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Chenglei Si , Zitong Yang , Yejin Choi , Emmanuel Candès , Diyi Yang , Tatsunori Hashimoto

The execution behavior of a program often depends on external resources, such as program inputs or file contents, and so cannot be run in isolation. Nevertheless, software developers benefit from fast iteration loops where automated tools…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 David Bieber , Rishab Goel , Daniel Zheng , Hugo Larochelle , Daniel Tarlow

Code generation and understanding are critical capabilities for large language models (LLMs). Thus, most LLMs are pretrained and fine-tuned on code data. However, these datasets typically treat code as static strings and rarely exploit the…

Program synthesis from input-output (IO) examples has been a long-standing challenge. While recent works demonstrated limited success on domain-specific languages (DSL), it remains highly challenging to apply them to real-world programming…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Xinyun Chen , Dawn Song , Yuandong Tian

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique that allows for the systematic exploration of all program paths. Path explosion, where the number of states to track becomes unwieldy, is one of the biggest challenges hindering…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Joshua Bailey , Charles Nicholas

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 novel approach to neural code generation that incorporates real-time execution signals into the language model generation process. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Boaz Lavon , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

Symbolic execution is an important software analysis technique which benefits downstream tasks such as software testing and debugging. However, several limitations hinder symbolic execution from application on real-world software. One of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wenhan Wang , Kaibo Liu , Zeyu Sun , An Ran Chen , Ge Li , Gang Huang , Lei Ma

We consider the problem of neural semantic parsing, which translates natural language questions into executable SQL queries. We introduce a new mechanism, execution guidance, to leverage the semantics of SQL. It detects and excludes faulty…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-17 Chenglong Wang , Kedar Tatwawadi , Marc Brockschmidt , Po-Sen Huang , Yi Mao , Oleksandr Polozov , Rishabh Singh

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, StarCoder, and CodeLlama, are transforming the way developers approach programming by automatically generating code based on given natural language descriptions. Despite advancements, generating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Zhihong Sun , Yao Wan , Jia Li , Hongyu Zhang , Zhi Jin , Ge Li , Chen Lyu

Current LLM-based coding agents follow a serial execution paradigm: the model first generates the complete code, then invokes an interpreter to execute it. This sequential workflow leaves the executor idle during generation and the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Zhensu Sun , Zhihao Lin , Zhi Chen , Chengran Yang , Mingyi Zhou , Li Li , David Lo

Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple…

Code translation is a crucial activity in the software development and maintenance process, and researchers have recently begun to focus on using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for code translation. However, existing LLMs only…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Minghua He , Yue Chen , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Wenjie Yin , Yu Kang , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang

Generative models of code, pretrained on large corpora of programs, have shown great success in translating natural language to code (Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022, inter alia). While these models do not explicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Freda Shi , Daniel Fried , Marjan Ghazvininejad , Luke Zettlemoyer , Sida I. Wang

Understanding a program's runtime reasoning behavior, meaning how intermediate states and control flows lead to final execution results, is essential for reliable code generation, debugging, and automated reasoning. Although large language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mohammad Abdollahi , Khandaker Rifah Tasnia , Soumit Kanti Saha , Jinqiu Yang , Song Wang , Hadi Hemmati

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for program analysis. However, it has many limitations in practical applicability: the path explosion problem encumbers scalability, the need for language-specific implementation, the inability to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Shiqi Shen , Soundarya Ramesh , Shweta Shinde , Abhik Roychoudhury , Prateek Saxena

Most existing pre-trained language models for source code focus on learning the static code text, typically augmented with static code structures (abstract syntax tree, dependency graphs, etc.). However, program semantics will not be fully…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Yangruibo Ding , Ben Steenhoek , Kexin Pei , Gail Kaiser , Wei Le , Baishakhi Ray

As coding agents are increasingly deployed in large codebases, the need to automatically design challenging, codebase-level evaluation is central. We propose Gistify, a task where a coding LLM must create a single, minimal, self-contained…