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Loop invariants are fundamental to reasoning about programs with loops. They establish properties about a given loop's behavior. When they additionally are inductive, they become useful for the task of formal verification that seeks to…

Synthesizing inductive loop invariants is fundamental to automating program verification. In this work, we observe that Large Language Models (such as gpt-3.5 or gpt-4) are capable of synthesizing loop invariants for a class of programs in…

Automated program verification has always been an important component of building trustworthy software. While the analysis of real-world programs remains a theoretical challenge, the automation of loop invariant analysis has effectively…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Ruibang Liu , Minyu Chen , Ling-I Wu , Jingyu Ke , Guoqiang Li

A loop invariant is a property of a loop that remains true before and after each execution of the loop. The identification of loop invariants is a critical step to support automated program safety assessment. Recent advancements in Large…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Mostafijur Rahman Akhond , Saikat Chakraborty , Gias Uddin

Loop invariants play a central role in the verification of imperative programs. However, finding these invariants is often a difficult and time-consuming task for the programmer. We have previously shown how program transformation can be…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-08-25 G. W. Hamilton

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program verification, and yet little is known about \emph{how} they reason about program semantics during this process. In this work, we focus on abstract interpretation based-reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Jacqueline L. Mitchell , Brian Hyeongseok Kim , Chenyu Zhou , Chao Wang

Loop invariant generation remains a critical bottleneck in automated program verification. Recent work has begun to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this area, yet these approaches tend to lack a reliable and structured…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Daragh King , Vasileios Koutavas , Laura Kovacs

The synthesis of inductive loop invariants is a critical bottleneck in automated program verification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in mitigating this issue, they often fail on hard instances, generating invariants that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ido Pinto , Yizhak Yisrael Elboher , Haoze Wu , Nina Narodytska , Guy Katz

Program verification relies on loop invariants, yet automatically discovering strong invariants remains a long-standing challenge. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can accelerate program verification by generating useful…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Anjiang Wei , Tianran Sun , Tarun Suresh , Haoze Wu , Ke Wang , Alex Aiken

We propose a novel framework that provides constructive feedback to an LLM in the "guess-and-check" paradigm by formally verifying its own thinking process and detecting local reasoning errors. We apply this framework to the loop invariant…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianchi Li , Zhenyu Yan , Junhao Liu , Peng Di , Xin Zhang

Loop invariants are essential for proving the correctness of programs with loops. Developing loop invariants is challenging, and fully automatic synthesis cannot be guaranteed for arbitrary programs. Some approaches have been proposed to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Varun Bharti , Shashwat Jha , Dhruv Kumar , Pankaj Jalote

Loop invariants are software properties that hold before and after every iteration of a loop. As such, invariants provide inductive arguments that are key in automating the verification of program loops. The problem of generating loop…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-05-25 George Kenison , Laura Kovács , Anton Varonka

The latest paradigm shift in software development brings in the innovation and automation afforded by Large Language Models (LLMs), showcased by Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), which has shown remarkable capacity to generate code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Xiaoyin Wang , Dakai Zhu

Software testing and verification are critical for ensuring the reliability and security of modern software systems. Traditionally, formal verification techniques, such as model checking and theorem proving, have provided rigorous…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Norbert Tihanyi , Tamas Bisztray , Mohamed Amine Ferrag , Bilel Cherif , Richard A. Dubniczky , Ridhi Jain , Lucas C. Cordeiro

The advent of large language models trained on code (code LLMs) has led to significant progress in language-to-code generation. State-of-the-art approaches in this area combine LLM decoding with sample pruning and reranking using test cases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Ansong Ni , Srini Iyer , Dragomir Radev , Ves Stoyanov , Wen-tau Yih , Sida I. Wang , Xi Victoria Lin

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved notable success in code-generation benchmarks such as HumanEval and LiveCodeBench. However, a detailed examination reveals that these evaluation suites often comprise only a limited number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zihan Ma , Taolin Zhang , Maosong Cao , Junnan Liu , Wenwei Zhang , Minnan Luo , Songyang Zhang , Kai Chen

The automatic generation of loop invariants is a fundamental challenge in software verification. While this task is undecidable in general, it is decidable for certain restricted classes of programs. This work focuses on invariant…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Rida Ait El Manssour , George Kenison , Mahsa Shirmohammadi , Anton Varonka

In the digital age, ensuring the correctness, safety, and reliability of software through formal verification is paramount, particularly as software increasingly underpins critical infrastructure. Formal verification, split into theorem…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Zhiyong Chen , Jialun Cao , Jiarong Wu , Chang Xu , Shing-Chi Cheung

The emergence of prompting as the dominant paradigm for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a proliferation of LLM-native software, where application behavior arises from complex, stochastic data transformations. However, the…

Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued progress of information technology. Full verification generally requires, as a crucial step, equipping each loop with a "loop invariant". Beyond their role in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-01-14 Carlo A. Furia , Bertrand Meyer , Sergey Velder
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