ICST 2026
Mon 18 - Fri 22 May 2026 Daejeon, South Korea
Wed 20 May 2026 10:55 - 11:20 at Room 103 - Specification Inference & Model Checking Chair(s): Eunkyoung Jee

Contract assertions, such as preconditions, postconditions, and invariants, play a crucial role in software development, enabling applications such as program verification, test generation, and debugging. Despite their benefits, the adoption of contract assertions is complex, due to the difficulty of manually producing such assertions. Dynamic analysis-based approaches, such as Daikon, can aid in this task by inferring expressive assertions from execution traces. However, a fundamental weakness of these methods is their reliance on the thoroughness of the underlying test suites, used for dynamic analysis. When these test suites are not thorough enough or do not contain sufficiently diverse tests, the inferred assertions are often not generalizable, leading to a high rate of invalid candidates (false positives) that must be manually filtered out.

In this paper, we explore the use of large language models to automatically generate tests that attempt to invalidate generated assertions. Our results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can generate effective counterexamples that help to discard up to 11.68% of invalid assertions inferred by SpecFuzzer. Moreover, when incorporating these LLM-generated counterexamples into the dynamic analysis process, we observe an improvement of up to 7% in precision of the inferred specifications, with respect to the ground-truths gathered from the evaluation benchmarks, without affecting recall.

Wed 20 May

Displayed time zone: Seoul change

10:30 - 12:00
Specification Inference & Model CheckingJournal-First Papers / Research Papers at Room 103
Chair(s): Eunkyoung Jee KAIST, South Korea
10:30
25m
Talk
GRANDSLAM: Linearly Scalable Model SynthesisArtifact Available
Research Papers
Alexander Boll University of Bern
10:55
25m
Talk
Improving Dynamic Specification Inference with LLM-Generated CounterexamplesArtifact ReviewedArtifact Available
Research Papers
Agustín Balestra University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, Agustin Nolasco University of Rio Cuarto, Facundo Molina Complutense University of Madrid, Diego Garbervetsky Departamento de Computación, FCEyN, UBA, Renzo Degiovanni Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Nazareno Aguirre University of Rio Cuarto/CONICET, Argentina, and Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, China
11:15
25m
Talk
Systematic API Testing Through Model Checking and Executable ContractsArtifact ReviewedArtifact Available
Research Papers
Ana Catarina Ribeiro NOVA FCT, Margarida Mamede NOVA FCT, Carla Ferreira NOVA University Lisbon
Pre-print
11:40
15m
Talk
Simulation-based Safety Assessment of Vehicle Characteristics Variations in Autonomous Driving Systems
Journal-First Papers
Qi Pan Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Tiexin Wang Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Jianwei Ma Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Paolo Arcaini National Institute of Informatics, Tao Yue Beihang University
Link to publication DOI