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Space Explanations of Neural Network Classification

Labbaf, Faezeh, Kolárik, Tomáš, Blicha, Martin, Fedyukovich, Grigory, Wand, Michael, Sharygina, Natasha

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Explainability of decision-making AI systems (XAI), and specifically neural networks (NNs), is a key requirement for deploying AI in sensitive areas [18]. A recent trend in explaining NNs is based on formal methods and logic, providing explanations for the decisions of machine learning systems [24, 31, 32, 41, 42, 44] accompanied by provable guarantees regarding their correctness. Yet, rigorous exploration of the continuous feature space requires to estimate decision boundaries with complex shapes. This, however, remains a challenge because existing explanations [24, 31, 32, 41, 42, 44] constrain only individual features and hence fail capturing relationships among the features that are essential to understand the reasons behind the multi-parametrized classification process. We address the need to provide interpretations of NN systems that are as meaningful as possible using a novel concept of Space Explanations, delivered by a flexible symbolic reasoning framework where Craig interpolation [12] is at the heart of the machinery.




Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling

Casadei, Roberto

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Macroprogramming refers to the theory and practice of conveniently expressing the macro(scopic) behaviour of a system using a single program. Macroprogramming approaches are motivated by the need of effectively capturing global/system-level aspects and the collective behaviour of a set of interacting components, while abstracting over low-level details. In the past, this style of programming has been primarily adopted to describe the data-processing logic in wireless sensor networks; recently, research forums on spatial computing, collective adaptive systems, and Internet-of-Things have provided renewed interest in macro-approaches. However, related contributions are still fragmented and lacking conceptual consistency. Therefore, to foster principled research, an integrated view of the field is provided, together with opportunities and challenges.



Inferring multiple helper Dafny assertions with LLMs

Silva, Álvaro, Mendes, Alexandra, Martins, Ruben

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Dafny verifier provides strong correctness guarantees but often requires numerous manual helper assertions, creating a significant barrier to adoption. We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically infer missing helper assertions in Dafny programs, with a primary focus on cases involving multiple missing assertions. To support this study, we extend the DafnyBench benchmark with curated datasets where one, two, or all assertions are removed, and we introduce a taxonomy of assertion types to analyze inference difficulty. Our approach refines fault localization through a hybrid method that combines LLM predictions with error-message heuristics. We implement this approach in a new tool called DAISY (Dafny Assertion Inference SYstem). While our focus is on multiple missing assertions, we also evaluate DAISY on single-assertion cases. DAISY verifies 63.4% of programs with one missing assertion and 31.7% with multiple missing assertions. Notably, many programs can be verified with fewer assertions than originally present, highlighting that proofs often admit multiple valid repair strategies and that recovering every original assertion is unnecessary. These results demonstrate that automated assertion inference can substantially reduce proof engineering effort and represent a step toward more scalable and accessible formal verification.


Beyond Postconditions: Can Large Language Models infer Formal Contracts for Automatic Software Verification?

Richter, Cedric, Wehrheim, Heike

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic software verifiers have become increasingly effective at the task of checking software against (formal) specifications. Yet, their adoption in practice has been hampered by the lack of such specifications in real world code. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in inferring formal postconditions from natural language hints embedded in code such as function names, comments or documentation. Using the generated postconditions as specifications in a subsequent verification, however, often leads verifiers to suggest invalid inputs, hinting at potential issues that ultimately turn out to be false alarms. To address this, we revisit the problem of specification inference from natural language in the context of automatic software verification. In the process, we introduce NL2Contract, the task of employing LLMs to translate informal natural language into formal functional contracts, consisting of postconditions as well as preconditions. We introduce metrics to validate and compare different NL2Contract approaches, using soundness, bug discriminative power of the generated contracts and their usability in the context of automatic software verification as key metrics. We evaluate NL2Contract with different LLMs and compare it to the task of postcondition generation nl2postcond. Our evaluation shows that (1) LLMs are generally effective at generating functional contracts sound for all possible inputs, (2) the generated contracts are sufficiently expressive for discriminating buggy from correct behavior, and (3) verifiers supplied with LLM inferred functional contracts produce fewer false alarms than when provided with postconditions alone. Further investigations show that LLM inferred preconditions generally align well with developers intentions which allows us to use automatic software verifiers to catch real-world bugs.