HoarePrompt is a new method that applies program verification concepts to natural language requirements, using large language models to generate step‑by‑step natural language descriptions of program states. It incorporates a few‑shot k‑induction technique to handle loops and then evaluates whether the annotated program satisfies the requirements. On the CoCoClaNeL dataset, HoarePrompt raises the Matthews correlation coefficient by 61% over zero‑shot chain‑of‑thought prompts and by 106% over test‑generation classifiers, with the inductive reasoning component adding a 26% MCC improvement.
arXiv:2507. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated Program Repair (APR) seeks to automatically correct software bugs without requiring human intervention.
arXiv:2606. 05792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TLA+ has supported industrial verification at companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, yet writing correct TLA+ specifications from natural language still requires time and expertise, which limits adoption.
arXiv:2507. 11687v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models excel at code generation but struggle with code linting, particularly in generalizing to unseen or evolving best practices beyond those observed during training.
The paper introduces Program Executability Prediction (PrEx), a task that asks large language models (LLMs) to determine whether a program is semantically valid or invalid and, if invalid, to identify the violated formal rule. To evaluate this, the authors create a dataset of systematically generated invalid programs derived from valid ones and test open‑source coding LLMs across different semantic formalisms, semantic shifts, and program splits (human‑written, LLM‑translated, fuzzer‑generated). Results show that LLMs rely more on pre‑training priors than on the provided semantics, performing poorly on modified semantics and with increasing program complexity.
arXiv:2607. 02057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents raise the level of abstraction in software development by shifting the focus from writing precise procedures to expressing intents and goals.
arXiv:2607. 23019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, yet the generated intermediate steps are not guaranteed to be logically sound.
The paper introduces CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing large language model reasoning quality across coding tasks such as generation, summarization, and classification. It analyzes over a thousand mismatches from existing evaluators, identifies recurring limitations, and derives design insights that lead to a new two‑stage evaluator, VERA. Experiments show VERA outperforms strong baselines, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21 on four datasets.
arXiv:2606. 15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism.
The paper introduces PolyHuman, a dataset of human-written programs in C++, Java, and Python, to test whether large language models can judge functional equivalence across languages. Using this dataset, the authors evaluate several open-weight and proprietary LLMs, finding that models struggle more with harder problems, show language-specific biases, and rely partly on superficial similarity cues. They also observe run‑to‑run instability in GPT‑o4‑mini, concluding that current LLMs do not reliably capture functional equivalence within or across programming languages.
The paper introduces RobustTests, a framework that improves reinforcement learning for code generation by synthesizing test cases from faulty code and refining rewards with a dense, stepwise function. It uses validator agents and behavioral clustering to filter out invalid or redundant tests, and incorporates pass‑rate‑based rewards to counter hallucination noise. Experiments on CodeContests and LiveCodeBench show that fine‑tuning Qwen3‑32B with RobustTests yields a 3% absolute performance gain over baseline methods.
arXiv:2602. 15983v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural language into optimization code, but silent failures pose a critical risk: code that executes and returns solver-feasible solutions may encode semantically incorrect formulations---a feasibility--correctness gap reaching 90 percentage points on compositional problems.
Large language models (LLMs) are used as post hoc explainers of sequential decision-making policies, producing natural-language explanations of why an action was chosen. However, LLMs often generate p...