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Using large language models (LLMs) to generate source code from natural language prompts is a popular and promising idea with a wide range of applications. One of its limitations is that the generated code can be faulty at times, often in a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in automated software engineering, yet their guarantee of correctness is frequently undermined by erroneous or hallucinated code. To enforce model honesty, formal verification requires LLMs to…

Verification-aware programming languages such as Dafny and F* provide means to formally specify and prove properties of a program. Although the problem of checking an implementation against a specification can be defined mechanically, there…

This research idea paper proposes leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the productivity of Dafny developers. Although the use of verification-aware languages, such as Dafny, has increased considerably in the last decade, these…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automated code generation but frequently produce code that fails formal verification, an essential requirement for hardware and safety-critical domains. To overcome…

Students in computing education increasingly use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Yet, the role of LLMs in supporting cognitively demanding tasks, like deductive program verification, remains poorly understood. This paper…

Program verifiers such as Dafny automate proofs by outsourcing them to an SMT solver. This automation is not perfect, however, and the solver often requires hints in the form of assertions, creating a burden for the proof engineer. In this…

This paper presents a focused literature survey on the use of large language models (LLM) to assist in writing formal specifications for software. A summary of thirty-five key papers is presented, including examples for specifying programs…

Formal verification has the potential to drastically reduce software bugs, but its high additional cost has hindered large-scale adoption. While Dafny presents a promise to significantly reduce the effort to write verified programs, users…

We introduce DafnyCOMP, a benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on compositional specification generation in Dafny. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on single-function tasks, DafnyCOMP targets programs composed of multiple…

Large language models show great promise in many domains, including programming. A promise is easy to make but hard to keep, and language models often fail to keep their promises, generating erroneous code. A promising avenue to keep models…

The research in AI-based formal mathematical reasoning has shown an unstoppable growth trend. These studies have excelled in mathematical competitions like IMO and have made significant progress. This paper focuses on formal verification,…

Debugging and repairing faults when programs fail to formally verify can be complex and time-consuming. Automated Program Repair (APR) can ease this burden by automatically identifying and fixing faults. However, traditional APR techniques…

We introduce DafnyBench, the largest benchmark of its kind for training and evaluating machine learning systems for formal software verification. We test the ability of LLMs such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 to auto-generate enough hints for the…

Although formal methods are capable of producing reliable software, they have seen minimal adoption in everyday programming. Automatic code generation using large language models is becoming increasingly widespread, but it rarely considers…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Verification is one of the central tasks in circuit and system design. While simulation and emulation are widely used, complete correctness can only be ensured based on formal proof techniques. But these approaches often have very high run…

Formal verification techniques aim at formally proving the correctness of a computer program with respect to a formal specification, but the expertise and effort required for applying formal specification and verification techniques and…

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) often confronts challenges stemming from the heavy reliance on human annotators in the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, or the frequent and costly external queries…

Formal specifications, such as pre- and post-conditions provide a solid basis for performing thorough program verification. However, developers rarely provide such formal specifications, hence if AI could help in constructing them, it would…