Automated Program Refinement: Guide and Verify Code Large Language Model with Refinement Calculus
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Recently, the rise of code-centric large language models (LLMs) appears to have reshaped the software engineering world with low-barrier tools like Copilot that can generate code easily. However, there is no correctness guarantee for the code generated by LLMs, which suffer from the hallucination problem, and their output is fraught with risks. Besides, the end-to-end process from specification to code through LLMs is a non-transparent and uncontrolled black box. This opacity makes it difficult for users to understand and trust the generated code. Addressing these challenges is both necessary and critical. In contrast, program refinement transforms high-level specification statements into executable code while preserving correctness. Traditional tools for program refinement are primarily designed for formal methods experts and lack automation and extensibility. We apply program refinement to guide LLM and validate the LLM-generated code while transforming refinement into a more accessible and flexible framework. To initiate this vision, we propose Refine4LLM, an approach that aims to: (1) Formally refine the specifications, (2) Automatically prompt and guide the LLM using refinement calculus, (3) Interact with the LLM to generate the code and proof obligations, (4) Verify that the generated code satisfies the constraints, thus guaranteeing its correctness, (5) Learn and build more refinement laws to extend the refinement calculus. We evaluated Refine4LLM against the state-of-the-art baselines on program refinement and LLMs benchmarks. The experiment results show that Refine4LLM can efficiently generate more robust code and reduce the time for refinement and verification.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Fri 24 JanDisplayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change
10:40 - 12:00 | |||
10:40 20mTalk | MimIR: An Extensible and Type-Safe Intermediate Representation for the DSL Age POPL Roland Leißa University of Mannheim, School of Business Informatics and Mathematics, Marcel Ullrich Saarland University, Joachim Meyer Compiler Design Lab; Saarland Informatics Campus; Saarland University, Sebastian Hack Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Simple Linear Loops: Algebraic Invariants and Applications POPL Rida Ait El Manssour CNRS & IRIF, Paris, George Kenison Liverpool John Moores University, Mahsa Shirmohammadi CNRS & IRIF, Paris, Anton Varonka TU Wien | ||
11:20 20mTalk | Automated Program Refinement: Guide and Verify Code Large Language Model with Refinement Calculus POPL Yufan Cai National University of Singapore, Zhe Hou Griffith University, David Sanan Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Xiaokun Luan Peking University, Yun Lin Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jun Sun Singapore Management University, Jin Song Dong National University of Singapore | ||
11:40 20mTalk | Tail Modulo Cons, OCaml, and Relational Separation Logic POPL Clément Allain INRIA, Frédéric Bour Tarides, Basile Clément OCamlPro, François Pottier Inria, Gabriel Scherer Université Paris Cité - Inria - CNRS |