Formally Specifying the Intended Behavior of the Program: LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Program Specification Synthesis
Cheng Wen Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Hu Junjie, YiKun Hu, Jie Su Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Bin Yu, Dugang Liu Shenzhen University, Zhiwu Xu Shenzhen University, Weidi Sun Peking University 等 10 位作者
原文摘要
Formal verification can provide strong mathematical guarantees about software correctness, but it typically requires developers to write detailed formal specifications (e.g., contracts and loop invariants), which is costly and error-prone. We introduce AutoSpec+, an LLM-driven neuro-symbolic demonstration system that reframes specification writing as constrained structured synthesis: large language models generate candidate specifications at the granularity of proof-relevant program components, while a symbolic verifier acts as a deterministic critic that checks legality, satisfiability, and proof adequacy, rejecting or repairing candidates in an iterative loop. This design turns unconstrained text generation into constrained structured synthesis, substantially reducing hallucinations and producing proof-ready annotations. We evaluate AutoSpec+ on seven benchmark suites, showing strong effectiveness. We release an open-source, Dockerized system with ensemble LLM backends and inter-modular verification support for reproducible demonstration and deployment
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表