Related papers: Reasoning from a schema and from an analog in soft…

Rule-based reasoning is an essential part of human intelligence prominently formalized in artificial intelligence research via logic programs. Describing complex objects as the composition of elementary ones is a common strategy in computer…

Dependency cycles pose a significant challenge to software quality and maintainability. However, there is limited understanding of how practitioners resolve dependency cycles in real-world scenarios. This paper presents an empirical study…

Understanding a program's runtime reasoning behavior, meaning how intermediate states and control flows lead to final execution results, is essential for reliable code generation, debugging, and automated reasoning. Although large language…

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply…

Being able to duplicate published research results is an important process of conducting research whether to build upon these findings or to compare with them. This process is called "replicability" when using the original authors'…

The recently proposed set-up of source coding with a side information "vending machine" allows the decoder to select actions in order to control the quality of the side information. The actions can depend on the message received from the…

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Reverse engineering is a complex process essential to software-security tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. Significant research and engineering effort has gone into developing tools to support reverse engineers.…

Background: Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the code brought…

Code reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) in the code domain. It involves understanding and predicting a program's execution behavior, such as determining the output for a given input or whether a specific…

As the second book in the Anyone Can Code series, Algorithmic Thinking focuses on the logic behind computer programming and software design. With a data-centred approach, it starts with simple algorithms that work on simple data items and…

Many reasoning, planning, and problem-solving tasks share an intrinsic algorithmic nature: correctly simulating each step is a sufficient condition to solve them correctly. We collect pairs of naturalistic and synthetic reasoning tasks to…

This text analyses the papers accepted for the workshop "Reuse of designs: an interdisciplinary cognitive approach". Several dimensions and questions considered as important (by the authors and/or by us) are addressed: What about the…

There are many different forms of design knowledge that guide and shape a designer's ability to act and realize potential realities. Methods and schemas are examples of design knowledge commonly used by design researchers and designers…

Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought…

Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple cognitive…

Code super-optimization is the task of transforming any given program to a more efficient version while preserving its input-output behaviour. In some sense, it is similar to the paraphrase problem from natural language processing where the…

The dominant view of design in information systems and software engineering, the Rational Design Paradigm, views software development as a methodical, plan-centered, approximately rational process of optimizing a design candidate for known…

Introducing reasoning models into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhances task performance through step-by-step reasoning, logical consistency, and multi-step self-verification. However, recent studies have shown that…

Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…