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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

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

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

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-19 I. S. W. B. Prasetya , Fitsum Kifetew , Davide Prandi

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

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

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

Logic has proved essential for formally modeling software based systems. Such formal descriptions, frequently called specifications, have served not only as requirements documentation and formalisation, but also for providing the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Carlos G. Lopez Pombo , Thomas S. E. Maibaum

The work concerns automatic generation of logical specifications from requirements models. Logical specifications obtained in such a way can be subjected to formal verification using deductive reasoning. Formal verification concerns…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-02-11 Radoslaw Klimek

Temporal logics are powerful tools that are widely used for the synthesis and verification of reactive systems. The recent progress on Large Language Models (LLMs) has the potential to make the process of writing such specifications more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 William Murphy , Nikolaus Holzer , Nathan Koenig , Leyi Cui , Raven Rothkopf , Feitong Qiao , Mark Santolucito

Validation is a central activity when developing formal specifications. Similarly to coding, a possible validation technique is to define upfront test cases or scenarios that a future specification should satisfy or not. Unfortunately,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Alcino Cunha , Nuno Macedo

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 verification provides a rigorous and systematic approach to ensure the correctness and reliability of software systems. Yet, constructing specifications for the full proof relies on domain expertise and non-trivial manpower. In view…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Cheng Wen , Jialun Cao , Jie Su , Zhiwu Xu , Shengchao Qin , Mengda He , Haokun Li , Shing-Chi Cheung , Cong Tian

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on function-level code generation benchmarks, yet real-world software development increasingly demands class-level implementations that integrate multiple methods,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Musfiqur Rahman , SayedHassan Khatoonabadi , Emad Shihab

Requirements over strings, commonly represented using natural language (NL), are particularly relevant for software systems due to their heavy reliance on string data manipulation. While individual requirements can usually be analyzed…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Boqi Chen , Aren A. Babikian , Shuzhao Feng , Dániel Varró , Gunter Mussbacher

In the past few years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exploded in usefulness and popularity for code generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with accuracy and are unsuitable for high-risk applications without additional oversight…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-29 William Murphy , Nikolaus Holzer , Feitong Qiao , Leyi Cui , Raven Rothkopf , Nathan Koenig , Mark Santolucito

Rapid advances in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made LLM-based code generation an important area for investigation. An LLM-based code generator takes a prompt as input and produces code that implements the requirements…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Laboni Sarker , Mara Downing , Achintya Desai , Tevfik Bultan

Virtually all verification techniques using formal methods rely on the availability of a formal specification, which describes the design requirements precisely. However, formulating specifications remains a manual task that is notoriously…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Daniel Neider , Rajarshi Roy

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

This work is concerned with the generation of formal specifications from code, using Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with symbolic methods. Concretely, in our study, the programming language is C, the specification language is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-01 George Granberry , Wolfgang Ahrendt , Moa Johansson
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