Related papers: Non-Termination Proving: 100 Million LoC and Beyon…

Incorrect handling of security-critical data formats, particularly in low-level languages, are the root cause of many security vulnerabilities. Provably correct parsing and serialization tools that target languages like C can help. Towards…

While loops are present in virtually all imperative programming languages. They are important both for practical reasons (performing a number of iterations not known in advance) and theoretical reasons (achieving Turing completeness). In…

Despite strong performance on code generation tasks, it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs) genuinely reason about code execution. Existing code reasoning benchmarks primarily evaluate final output correctness under a…

The research described herewith investigates detecting change points of means and of variances in a sequence of observations. The number of change points can be divergent at certain rate as the sample size goes to infinity. We define a…

Since many real-world problems arising in the fields of compiler optimisation, automated software engineering, formal proof systems, and so forth are equivalent to the Halting Problem--the most notorious undecidable problem--there is a…

It is well-known that big-step semantics is not able to distinguish stuck and non-terminating computations. This is a strong limitation as it makes very difficult to reason about properties involving infinite computations, such as type…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has marked a significant advancement in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Previous studies have developed various extensions of CoT, which focus primarily on enhancing…

Software engineers often have to estimate the performance of a software system before having full knowledge of the system parameters, such as workload and operational profile. These uncertain parameters inevitably affect the accuracy of…

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted across diverse domains of software engineering, such as code generation, program repair, and vulnerability detection. These applications require understanding beyond surface-level code…

We present PULSE, a medical reasoning agent that combines a domain-tuned large language model with scientific literature retrieval to support diagnostic decision-making in complex real-world cases. To evaluate its capabilities, we curated a…

To exploit a given physical system for quantum information processing, it is critical to understand the different types of noise affecting quantum control. Distinguishing coherent and incoherent errors is extremely useful as they can be…

Quantum computers are on the brink of surpassing the capabilities of even the most powerful classical computers. This naturally raises the question of how one can trust the results of a quantum computer when they cannot be compared to…

We show that a subclass of infinite-state probabilistic programs that can be modeled by probabilistic one-counter automata (pOC) admits an efficient quantitative analysis. In particular, we show that the expected termination time can be…

Proving programs terminating is a fundamental computer science challenge. Recent research has produced powerful tools that can check a wide range of programs for termination. The analog for probabilistic programs, namely termination with…

We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…

Quantum systems, in general, output data that cannot be simulated efficiently by a classical computer, and hence is useful for solving certain mathematical problems and simulating quantum many-body systems. This also implies, unfortunately,…

We introduce SOCK, a benchmark command line interface (CLI) that measures large language models' (LLMs) ability to self-replicate without human intervention. In this benchmark, self-replication is defined not only as an LLM's ability to…

This Survey provides an overview of techniques in termination analysis for programs with numerical variables and transitions defined by linear constraints. This subarea of program analysis is challenging due to the existence of undecidable…

Computer programs may go wrong due to exceptional behaviors, out-of-bound array accesses, or simply coding errors. Thus, they cannot be blindly trusted. Scientific computing programs make no exception in that respect, and even bring…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across software engineering tasks, from code generation to translation. However, we identify and systematically evaluate a critical failure mode: Programming Language…