相关论文: Causes and Effects in Computer Programs

Causal effects are commonly defined as comparisons of the potential outcomes under treatment and control, but this definition is threatened by the possibility that the treatment or control condition is not well-defined, existing instead in…

Missingness, or the absence of features from an input, is a concept fundamental to many model debugging tools. However, in computer vision, pixels cannot simply be removed from an image. One thus tends to resort to heuristics such as…

Debugging consumes a substantial portion of the software development lifecycle, yet the effectiveness of Large Language Models(LLMs) in this task is not well understood. Competitive programming offers a rich benchmark for such evaluation,…

Knowing the truth is rarely enough -- we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a…

We consider the problem of specifying and proving the security of non-trivial, concurrent programs that intentionally leak information. We present a method that decomposes the problem into (a) proving that the program only leaks information…

Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling…

Many proofs in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science are based on the probabilistic method. To prove the existence of a good object, we pick a random object and show that it is bad with low probability. This method is…

This paper presents a logic based approach to debugging Java programs. In contrast with traditional debugging we propose a debugging methodology for Java programs using logical queries on individual execution states and also over the…

Inductive theorem provers often diverge. This paper describes a simple critic, a computer program which monitors the construction of inductive proofs attempting to identify diverging proof attempts. Divergence is recognized by means of a…

Software engineering increasingly involves making high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, using signals from code, field data, and socio-technical processes. Recent AI-driven support (e.g., anomaly detection, predictive analytics, AIOps,…

Many debugging tools rely on compiler-produced metadata to present a source-language view of program states, such as variable values and source line numbers. While this tends to work for unoptimised programs, current compilers often…

As semantically-enabled applications require high-quality ontologies, developing and maintaining ontologies that are as correct and complete as possible is an important although difficult task in ontology engineering. A key step is ontology…

Code search engine is an essential tool in software development. Many code search methods have sprung up, focusing on the overall ranking performance of code search. In this paper, we study code search from another perspective by analyzing…

In program semantics and verification, reasoning about loops is complicated by the need to produce two separate mathematical arguments: an invariant, for functional properties (ignoring termination); and a variant, for termination (ignoring…

As new advancements in the field of quantum computing lead to the development of increasingly complex programs, approaches to validate and debug these programs are becoming more important. To this end, methods employed in classical…

Monitoring is the study of a system at runtime, looking for input and output events to discover, check or enforce behavioral properties. Interactive debugging is the study of a system at runtime in order to discover and understand its bugs…

Tile-based programming frameworks are increasingly adopted to write high-performance GPU kernels in domains such as deep learning and scientific computing. While these frameworks enhance productivity and hardware utilization, their…

Debugging ML software (i.e., the detection, localization and fixing of faults) poses unique challenges compared to traditional software largely due to the probabilistic nature and heterogeneity of its development process. Various methods…

Automatic Program Repair (APR) is a brilliant idea: when detecting a bug, also provide suggestions for correcting the program. Progress towards that goal is hindered by the absence of a common frame of reference for the multiplicity of APR…

To understand and explain process behaviour we need to be able to see it, and decide its significance, i.e. be able to tell a story about its behaviours. This paper describes a few of the modelling challenges that underlie monitoring and…