From Syntactic to Semantic Spectra for Fault Localization
Fault localization identifies program locations responsible for observed failures. Existing techniques often rely on structural proxies to correlate failures with execution behavior. Such proxies collapse when failures arise from violations of semantic intent, such as numeric invariants, value relations, and state or temporal consistency, without altering execution structure.
In this paper, we propose SemLoc, a fault localization framework based on semantic spectra anchored to program structures. The key essence is that semantic properties can be inferred and explicitly indexed to program structure. SemLoc first infers domain‑specific constraints from code, indexes them across functions, blocks, and dataflows, and evaluates them at runtime to identify violated invariants. It then applies counterfactual verification to refine localization by pruning inferred constraints that are incorrect or incomplete. Our preliminary results indicate that SemLoc reduces the candidate faulty lines by 74.4%, corresponding to 5.2$\times$ reduction compared with spectrum-based fault localization and 6.2$\times$ reduction compared with delta debugging, while matching the ground-truth faulty locations on all evaluated subjects.
The investigation of semantic spectra indexed to program structure naturally generalizes to future spectra based on data characteristics, value distributions, or learned representations.
Thu 9 JulDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | Anomaly and failure 2Ideas, Visions and Reflections / Research Papers / Industry Papers at MB 5.215 Chair(s): Domenico Bianculli University of Luxembourg | ||
14:00 20mTalk | StepFly: Agentic Troubleshooting Guide Automation for Incident Diagnosis Research Papers Jiayi Mao Tsinghua University, Liqun Li Microsoft Research, Yanjie Gao Microsoft Research, Zegang Peng Tsinghua University, Shilin He Microsoft Research, Chaoyun Zhang Microsoft, Si Qin Microsoft Research, Samia Khalid Microsoft, Qingwei Lin Microsoft, Saravan Rajmohan Microsoft, Sitaram Lanka Microsoft, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft Pre-print | ||
14:20 20mTalk | Spectrum-based Failure Attribution for Multi-Agent Systems Research Papers Yu Ge Nanjing University, Linna Xie Nanjing University, Zhong Li Nanjing University, Yu Pei Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Tian Zhang Nanjing University Pre-print | ||
14:40 10mTalk | RuntimeSlicer: Towards Generalizable Unified Runtime State Representation for Failure Management Ideas, Visions and Reflections Lingzhe Zhang Peking University, China, Tong Jia Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China, Weijie Hong Peking university, Mingyu Wang Peking University, Chiming Duan Peking University, Minghua He Peking University, Rongqian Wang Huawei Theory Lab, Xi Peng Huawei Theory Lab, Meiling Wang Huawei America Lab, Nicholas Zhang Huawei Theory Lab, Renhai Chen Huawei Theory Lab, Ying Li School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing, China | ||
14:50 10mTalk | Efficient Failure Management for Multi-Agent Systems with Reasoning Trace Representation Ideas, Visions and Reflections Lingzhe Zhang Peking University, China, Tong Jia Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, China, Mingyu Wang Peking University, Weijie Hong Peking university, Chiming Duan Peking University, Minghua He Peking University, Rongqian Wang Huawei Theory Lab, Xi Peng Huawei Theory Lab, Meiling Wang Huawei America Lab, Nicholas Zhang Huawei Theory Lab, Renhai Chen Huawei Theory Lab, Ying Li School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing, China | ||
15:00 20mTalk | FaultWeave: Bounded Resilience Testing with Failure Diagnosis Capability for Microservice Applications Industry Papers Mingzhuo Zheng Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guoquan Wu Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Nanjing College; China Southern Power Grid, Jinbo Zhang Information Center, Guangdong Power Grid, Jun Wei Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wei Chen Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiaxin Zhu Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zheheng Liang Joint Laboratory on Cyberspace Security of China Southern Power Grid | ||
15:20 10mTalk | From Syntactic to Semantic Spectra for Fault Localization Ideas, Visions and Reflections Zhaorui Yang University of California, Riverside, Qian Zhang University of California at Riverside, Rajiv Gupta University of California at Riverside, Ashish Kundu Cisco Research | ||