Browsing by Author "Molina, Facundo"

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    An evolutionary approach to translating operational specifications into declarative specifications
    (2019-07) Molina, Facundo; Cornejo, César; Degiovanni, Renzo; Regis, Germán; Castro, Pablo; Aguirre, Nazareno; Frías, Marcelo
    "Various tools for program analysis, including run-time assertion checkers and static analyzers such as verification and test generation tools, require formal specifications of the programs being analyzed. Moreover, many of these tools and techniques require such specifications to be written in a particular style, or follow certain patterns, in order to obtain an acceptable performance from the corresponding analyses. Thus, having a formal specification sometimes is not enough for using a particular technique, since such specification may not be provided in the right formalism. In this paper, we deal with this problem in the increasingly common case of having an operational specification, while for analysis reasons requiring a declarative specification. We propose an evolutionary approach to translate an operational specification written in a sequential programming language, into a declarative specification, in relational logic. We perform experiments on a benchmark of data structure implementations, for which operational invariants are available, and show that our evolutionary computation based approach to translating specifications achieves very good precision in this context, and produces declarative specifications that are more amenable to analyses that demand specifications in this style. This is assessed in two contexts: bounded verification of data structure invariant preservation, and instance enumeration using symbolic execution aided by tight bounds."
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    EvoSpex: An evolutionary algorithm for learning postconditions (artifact)
    (2021) Molina, Facundo; Ponzio, Pablo; Aguirre, Nazareno; Frías, Marcelo
    "Having the expected behavior of software specified in a formal language can greatly improve the automation of software verification activities, since these need to contrast the intended behavior with the actual software implementation. Unfortunately, software many times lacks such specifications, and thus providing tools and techniques that can assist developers in the construction of software specifications are relevant in software engineering. As an aid in this context, we present EvoSpex, a tool that given a Java method, automatically produces a specification of the method’s current behavior, in the form of postcondition assertions. EvoSpex is based on generating software runs from the implementation (valid runs), making modifications to the runs to build divergent behaviors (invalid runs), and executing a genetic algorithm that tries to evolve a specification to satisfy the valid runs, and leave out the invalid ones. Our tool supports a rich JML-like assertion language, that can capture complex specifications, including sophisticated object structural properties."
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    From operational to declarative specifications using a genetic algorithm
    (2018-05) Molina, Facundo; Degiovanni, Renzo; Regis, Germán; Castro, Pablo; Aguirre, Nazareno; Frías, Marcelo
    "In specification-based test generation, sometimes having a formal specification is not sufficient, since the specification may be in a different formalism from that required by the generation approach being used. In this paper, we deal with this problem specifically in the context in which, while having a formal specification in the form of an operational invariant written in a sequential programming language, one needs, for test generation, a declarative invariant in a logical formalism. We propose a genetic algorithm that given a catalog of common properties of invariants, such as acyclicity, sortedness and balance, attempts to evolve a conjunction of these that most accurately approximates an original operational specification. We present some details of the algorithm, and an experimental evaluation based on a benchmark of data structures, for which we evolve declarative logical invariants from operational ones."
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    Training binary classifiers as data structure invariants
    (2019-05) Molina, Facundo; Degiovanni, Renzo; Ponzio, Pablo; Regis, Germán; Aguirre, Nazareno; Frías, Marcelo
    "We present a technique to distinguish valid from invalid data structure objects. The technique is based on building an artificial neural network, more precisely a binary classifier, and training it to identify valid and invalid instances of a data structure. The obtained classifier can then be used in place of the data structure’s invariant, in order to attempt to identify (in)correct behaviors in programs manipulating the structure. In order to produce the valid objects to train the network, an assumed-correct set of object building routines is randomly executed. Invalid instances are produced by generating values for object fields that “break” the collected valid values, i.e., that assign values to object fields that have not been observed as feasible in the assumed-correct executions that led to the collected valid instances. We experimentally assess this approach, over a benchmark of data structures.We show that this learning technique produces classifiers that achieve significantly better accuracy in classifying valid/invalid objects compared to a technique for dynamic invariant detection, and leads to improved bug finding."