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Related papers: Seeking Specifications: The Case for Neuro-Symboli…

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We investigate how combinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and symbolic analyses can be used to synthesise specifications of C programs. The LLM prompts are augmented with outputs from two formal methods tools in the Frama-C ecosystem,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-19 George Granberry , Wolfgang Ahrendt , Moa Johansson

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 verification of memory-manipulating programs critically depends on precise function specifications that capture memory states written by experts. This requirement has become a major bottleneck as large language models (LLMs)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Liao Zhang , Tong Chen , Xiwei Wu , Qi Liu , Xiyu Zhai , Xinqi Wang , Qinxiang Cao

Formal specifications are crucial for building verifiable and dependable software systems, yet generating accurate and verifiable specifications for real-world C programs remains challenging. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Arshad Beg , Diarmuid O'Donoghue , Rosemary Monahan

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in translating natural language (NL) queries into visualizations, but their "black-box" nature often limits explainability and debuggability. In response, we present a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Subham Sah , Rishab Mitra , Arpit Narechania , Alex Endert , John Stasko , Wenwen Dou

Recent frontier large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in identifying security vulnerabilities in large, mature open-source systems. As LLM-generated code becomes increasingly common, a natural goal is to prevent such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Zhaorui Li , Chengyu Song

Software specifications are essential for many Software Engineering (SE) tasks such as bug detection and test generation. Many existing approaches are proposed to extract the specifications defined in natural language form (e.g., comments)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Danning Xie , Byungwoo Yoo , Nan Jiang , Mijung Kim , Lin Tan , Xiangyu Zhang , Judy S. Lee

Analysis tools like abstract interpreters, symbolic execution tools and testing tools usually require a proper context to give useful results when analyzing a particular function. Such a context initializes the function parameters and…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Michele Alberti , Julien Signoles

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied across various domains, including code-related tasks such as code translation. Previous studies have explored using LLMs for translating code between different programming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Soumit Kanti Saha , Fazle Rabbi , Song Wang , Jinqiu Yang

Formal specification is essential for rigorous program verification, yet writing correct specifications remains costly and difficult to automate. Although large language models (LLMs) and agents have shown promising progress, their true…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dong Xu , Jialun Cao , Guozhao Mo , Junjie Hu , Cheng Wen , Hongyu Lin , Xianpei Han , Shengchao Qin , Cong Tian , Shing-Chi Cheung , Le Sun , Yaojie Lu

The development of architecture specifications is an initial and fundamental stage of the integrated circuit (IC) design process. Traditionally, architecture specifications are crafted by experienced chip architects, a process that is not…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Mengming Li , Wenji Fang , Qijun Zhang , Zhiyao Xie

Neural-symbolic methods have demonstrated efficiency in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods mainly rely on syntactically mapping natural languages to complete formal languages like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Yiming Wang , Zhuosheng Zhang , Pei Zhang , Baosong Yang , Rui Wang

Logical specifications play a key role in the formal analysis of behavioural models. Automating the derivation of such specifications is particularly valuable in complex systems, where manual construction is time-consuming and error-prone.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Radoslaw Klimek , Julia Witek

Cognitive systems generally require a human to translate a problem definition into some specification that the cognitive system can use to attempt to solve the problem or perform the task. In this paper, we illustrate that large language…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Robert E. Wray , James R. Kirk , John E. Laird

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

As IC design grows more complex, automating comprehension and documentation of RTL code has become increasingly important. Engineers currently should manually interpret existing RTL code and write specifications, a slow and error-prone…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Hung-Ming Huang , Yu-Hsin Yang , Fu-Chieh Chang , Yun-Chia Hsu , Yin-Yu Lin , Ming-Fang Tsai , Chun-Chih Yang , Pei-Yuan Wu

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

Over the past decade, different domain-specific languages (DSLs) were proposed to formally specify requirements stated in legal contracts, mainly for analysis but also for code generation. Symboleo is a promising language in that area.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Mounira Nihad Zitouni , Amal Ahmed Anda , Sahil Rajpal , Daniel Amyot , John Mylopoulos

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
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