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Formal specification generation has recently drawn attention in software engineering as a way to improve program correctness without requiring manual annotations. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in this area, but early…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Ragib Shahariar Ayon , Shibbir Ahmed

Program verification is a formal technique to rigorously ensure the correctness and fault-freeness of software systems. However, constructing comprehensive interprocedural specifications for full verification obligations is time-consuming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Lezhi Ma , Shangqing Liu , Yi Li , Qiong Wu , Han Wang , Lei Bu

We present \synver{}, a novel synthesis and verification framework for C programs, that deploys a Large Language Model (LLM) to search for a candidate program that satisfies the given specification. Our key idea is to impose syntactic and…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Prasita Mukherjee , Benjamin Delaware

Recently, program synthesis driven by large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly popular. However, program synthesis for machine learning (ML) tasks still poses significant challenges. This paper explores a novel form of program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Jinglue Xu , Jialong Li , Zhen Liu , Nagar Anthel Venkatesh Suryanarayanan , Guoyuan Zhou , Jia Guo , Hitoshi Iba , Kenji Tei

Safety- and security-critical systems have to be thoroughly tested against their specifications. The state of practice is to have _natural language_ specifications, from which test cases are derived manually - a process that is slow,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Kuangxiangzi Liu , Dhiman Chakraborty , Alexander Liggesmeyer , Andreas Zeller

Traditional formal specification generation methods are typically tailored to specific specification types, and therefore suffer from limited generality. In recent years, large language model (LLM)-based specification generation approaches…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zehan Chen , Long Zhang , Zhiwei Zhang , JingJing Zhang , Ruoyu Zhou , Yulong Shen , JianFeng Ma , Lin Yang

Software configurations play a crucial role in determining the behavior of software systems. In order to ensure safe and error-free operation, it is necessary to identify the correct configuration, along with their valid bounds and rules,…

Automatically generating formal specifications including loop invariants, preconditions, and postconditions for legacy code is critical for program understanding, reuse and verification. However, the inherent complexity of control and data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Fanpeng Yang , Xu Ma , Shuling Wang , Xiong Xu , Qinxiang Cao , Naijun Zhan , Xiaofeng Li , Bin Gu

Formal program specifications play a crucial role in various stages of software development. However, manually crafting formal program specifications is rather difficult, making the job time-consuming and labor-intensive. It is even more…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Lezhi Ma , Shangqing Liu , Yi Li , Xiaofei Xie , Lei Bu

Fully automated verification of large-scale software and hardware systems is arguably the holy grail of formal methods. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential for enhancing the degree of automation in formal…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Zhongyi Wang , Tengjie Lin , Mingshuai Chen , Haokun Li , Mingqi Yang , Xiao Yi , Shengchao Qin , Yixing Luo , Xiaofeng Li , Bin Gu , Liqiang Lu , Jianwei Yin

Ensuring that API implementations and usage comply with natural language programming rules is critical for software correctness, security, and reliability. Formal verification can provide strong guarantees but requires precise…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Shihao Xia , Mengting He , Haomin Jia , Linhai Song

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

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

Software correctness is ensured mathematically through formal verification, which involves the resources of generating formal requirement specifications and having an implementation that must be verified. Tools such as model-checkers and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Arshad Beg , Diarmuid O'Donoghue , Rosemary Monahan

Formal specifications play a pivotal role in accurately characterizing program behaviors and ensuring software correctness. In recent years, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for the automatic generation of program specifications has…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zehan Chen , Long Zhang , Zhiwei Zhang , JingJing Zhang , Ruoyu Zhou , Yulong Shen , JianFeng Ma , Lin Yang

Automatic code completion helps improve developers' productivity in their programming tasks. A program contains instructions expressed via code statements, which are considered as the basic units of program execution. In this paper, we…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Son Nguyen , Tien N. Nguyen , Yi Li , Shaohua Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to automate programming tasks. Yet, LLMs' capabilities in reasoning about program semantics are still inadequately studied, leaving significant potential for further exploration. This…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Thanh Le-Cong , Bach Le , Toby Murray

The paper studies how code generation by LLMs can be combined with formal verification to produce critical embedded software. The first contribution is a general framework, spec2code, in which LLMs are combined with different types of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Minal Suresh Patil , Gustav Ung , Mattias Nyberg

Formal specifications play a central role in ensuring software reliability and correctness. However, automatically synthesizing high-quality formal specifications remains a challenging task, often requiring domain expertise. Recent work has…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Md Rakib Hossain Misu , Iris Ma , Cristina V. Lopes

Large language models possess impressive capabilities in generating programs (e.g., Python) from natural language descriptions to execute robotic tasks. However, these generated programs often contain errors that violate externally given…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yunhao Yang , Neel P. Bhatt , William Ward , Zichao Hu , Joydeep Biswas , Ufuk Topcu
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