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Regular expressions (regexes) are widely used in different fields of computer science, such as programming languages, string processing, and databases. However, existing tools for synthesizing or repairing regexes always assume that the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Shujun Wang , Yongqiang Tian andDengcheng He

Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Nasir U. Eisty , Jeffrey C. Carver

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal synthesis technique for automatically constructing regular expressions (regexes) from a combination of examples and natural language. Using multiple modalities is useful in this context because…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Qiaochu Chen , Xinyu Wang , Xi Ye , Greg Durrett , Isil Dillig

Regular expressions with backreferences (regex, for short), as supported by most modern libraries for regular expression matching, have an NP-complete matching problem. We define a complexity parameter of regex, called active variable…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Markus L. Schmid

Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) is a vulnerability class that has become prominent in recent years. Attackers can weaponize such weaknesses as part of asymmetric cyberattacks that exploit the slow worst-case matching time of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Masudul Hasan Masud Bhuiyan , Berk Çakar , Ethan H. Burmane , James C. Davis , Cristian-Alexandru Staicu

Programming-by-example (PBE) systems aim to alleviate the burden of programming. However, user-specified examples are often ambiguous, leaving multiple programs to satisfy the specification. Consequently, in most prior work, users have had…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Priyan Vaithilingam , Yewen Pu , Elena L. Glassman

Regular expression (regex) matching is fundamental in many applications, especially in web services. However, matching by backtracking -- preferred by most real-world implementations for its practical performance and backward compatibility…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Hiroya Fujinami , Ichiro Hasuo

With the rapidly increasing capabilities and adoption of code agents for AI-assisted coding, safety concerns, such as generating or executing risky code, have become significant barriers to the real-world deployment of these agents. To…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chengquan Guo , Xun Liu , Chulin Xie , Andy Zhou , Yi Zeng , Zinan Lin , Dawn Song , Bo Li

Regular expressions are pervasive in modern systems. Many real-world regular expressions are inefficient, sometimes to the extent that they are vulnerable to complexity-based attacks, and while much research has focused on detecting…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Jedidiah McClurg , Miles Claver , Jackson Garner , Jake Vossen , Jordan Schmerge , Mehmet E. Belviranli

We propose regular expression inference (REI) as a challenge for code/language modelling, and the wider machine learning community. REI is a supervised machine learning (ML) and program optimisation task, and poses the problem of finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Mojtaba Valizadeh , Philip John Gorinski , Ignacio Iacobacci , Martin Berger

In formal synthesis of reactive systems an implementation of a system is automatically constructed from its formal specification. The great advantage of synthesis is that the resulting implementation is correct by construction; therefore…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Hadas Kress-Gazit , Hazem Torfah

In the past few years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exploded in usefulness and popularity for code generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with accuracy and are unsuitable for high-risk applications without additional oversight…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-29 William Murphy , Nikolaus Holzer , Feitong Qiao , Leyi Cui , Raven Rothkopf , Nathan Koenig , Mark Santolucito

Regular expressions are a fundamental concept in computer science and widely used in various applications. In this paper we focused on deterministic regular expressions (DREs). Considering that researchers didn't have large datasets as…

Databases · Computer Science 2018-06-01 Yeting Li , Xinyu Chu , Xiaoying Mou , Chunmei Dong , Haiming Chen

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Dimitri Racordon , Didier Buchs

Regular expressions (regexes) are foundational to modern computing for critical tasks like input validation and data parsing, yet their ubiquity exposes systems to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS), a vulnerability requiring…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Sicheol Sung , Joonghyuk Hahn , Yo-Sub Han

Fast matching of regular expressions with bounded repetition, aka counting, such as (ab){50,100}, i.e., matching linear in the length of the text and independent of the repetition bounds, has been an open problem for at least two decades.…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Lukáš Holík , Juraj Síč , Lenka Turoňová , Tomáš Vojnar

Existing Programming-By-Example (PBE) systems often rely on simplified benchmarks that fail to capture the high structural complexity-such as deeper nesting and frequent Unions-of real-world regexes. To overcome the resulting performance…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Seongmin Kim , Hyunjoon Cheon , Su-Hyeon Kim , Yo-Sub Han , Sang-Ki Ko

Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Md Ariful Islam Malik , Jeffrey C. Carver , Nasir U. Eisty

Modern software development without reactive programming is hard to imagine. Reactive programming favors a wide class of contemporary software systems that respond to user input, network messages, and other events. While reactive…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-04-03 Stefan Ramson , Robert Hirschfeld

The explosive rate of information growth and availability often makes it increasingly difficult to locate information pertinent to your needs. These problems are often compounded when keyword based search methodologies are not adequate for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2008-10-10 Christopher M. Frenz