Related papers: Revisiting Code Debloating with Ground Truth-based…

Decompilation -- recovering source code from compiled binaries -- is essential for security analysis, malware reverse engineering, and legacy software maintenance. However, existing decompilers produce code that often fails to compile or…

High quality annotations are increasingly a bottleneck in the explosively growing machine learning ecosystem. Scalable evaluation methods that avoid costly annotation have therefore become an important research ambition. Many hope to use…

Code debugging is a vital stage of software development, essential for ensuring the reliability and performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the code generation task. Human debugging typically follows a multi-stage process, which…

Deep Learning (DL) is finding its way into a growing number of mobile software applications. These software applications, named as DL based mobile applications (abbreviated as mobile DL apps) integrate DL models trained using large-scale…

Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true…

Binary program analysis represents a fundamental pillar of modern system security. Fine-grained methodologies like dynamic taint analysis still suffer from deployment complexity and performance overhead despite significant progress.…

Static code analysis tools are designed to aid software developers to build better quality software in less time, by detecting defects early in the software development life cycle. Even the most experienced developer regularly introduces…

Static analysis is the analysis of a program without executing it, usually carried out by an automated tool. Symbolic execution is a popular static analysis technique used both in program verification and in bug detection software. It works…

The evaluation of code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally constrained by two intertwined challenges: a reliance on static, easily contaminated problem sources and the use of superficial, low-rigor testing. This paper…

Motivated by experience in programming and in the teaching of programming, we make another assault on the longstanding problem of debugging. Having explored why debuggers are not used as widely as one might expect, especially in functional…

Large language models (LLMs) significantly enhance the performance of various applications, but they are computationally intensive and energy-demanding. This makes it challenging to deploy them on devices with limited resources, such as…

Software bloat refers to code and features that is not used by a software during runtime. For Machine Learning (ML) systems, bloat is a major contributor to their technical debt leading to decreased performance and resource wastage. In this…

Refactoring tools in popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can introduce unintended behavioral changes or compilation errors, a persistent challenge that undermines developer trust in automated transformations. Traditional…

In our times, when the world is increasingly becoming more dependent on software programs, writing bug-free, correct programs is crucial. Program verification based on formal methods can guarantee this by detecting run-time errors in…

Code coverage analysis plays an important role in the software testing process. More recently, the remarkable effectiveness of coverage feedback has triggered a broad interest in feedback-guided fuzzing. In this work, we introduce bcov, a…

Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…

Automated Program Repair (APR) can reduce the time developers spend debugging, allowing them to focus on other aspects of software development. Automatically generated bug patches are typically validated through software testing. However,…

Backtracking (i.e., reverse execution) helps the user of a debugger to naturally think backwards along the execution path of a program, and thinking backwards makes it easy to locate the origin of a bug. So far backtracking has been…

Software debloating is an emerging field of study aimed at improving the security and performance of software by removing excess library code and features that are not needed by the end user (called bloat). Software bloat is pervasive, and…

Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…