Mining assumptions for software components using machine learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software verification approaches aim to check a software component under analysis for all possible environments. In reality, however, components are expected to operate within a larger system and are required to satisfy their requirements only when their inputs are constrained by environment assumptions. In this paper, we propose EPIcuRus, an approach to automatically synthesize environment assumptions for a component under analysis (i.e., conditions on the component inputs under which the component is guaranteed to satisfy its requirements). EPIcuRus combines search-based testing, machine learning and model checking. The core of EPIcuRus is a decision tree algorithm that infers environment assumptions from a set of test results including test cases and their verdicts. The test cases are generated using search-based testing, and the assumptions inferred by decision trees are validated through model checking. In order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the assumption generation process, we propose a novel test case generation technique, namely Important Features Boundary Test (IFBT), that guides the test generation based on the feedback produced by machine learning. We evaluated EPIcuRus by assessing its effectiveness in computing assumptions on a set of study subjects that include 18 requirements of four industrial models. We show that, for each of the 18 requirements, EPIcuRus was able to compute an assumption to ensure the satisfaction of that requirement, and further, ≈78% of these assumptions were computed in one hour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".