Selecting Context-Sensitivity Modularly for Accelerating Object-Sensitive Pointer Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Object-sensitive pointer analysis (denotedkobjunder$k$-limiting) for an object-oriented program can be accelerated if context-sensitivity can be selectively applied to only some precision-critical variables/objects in a program. Existing pre-analyses for making such selections, which are performed as whole-program analyses to a program, are developed based on two broad approaches. One approach preserves the precision of object-sensitive pointer analysis but achieves limited speedups by reasoning about all the possible value flows in the program conservatively, while the other approach achieves greater speedups but sacrifices precision (often unduly) by examining only some but not all the value flows in the program heuristically. In this paper, we introduce a new pre-analysis approach,Turner$^{\mathcal{m}}$(where$\mathcal {m}$stands for modularity), that represents a sweet spot between these two existing ones, as it is designed to enablekobjto run significantly faster than the former approach and achieve significantly better precision than the latter approach.Turner$^{\mathcal{m}}$is simple, lightweight yet effective due to two novel aspects in its design. First, we exploit a key observation that some precision-uncritical objects in the program can be approximated based on the object-containment relationship pre-established (from Andersen's analysis). In practice, this approximation introduces only a small degree of imprecision intokobj. Second, leveraging this initial approximation, we apply a novel object reachability analysis to the program by pre-analyzing its methods according to a reverse topological order of its call graph. When pre-analyzing each method, we make use of a simple DFA (Deterministic Finite Automaton) to reason about object reachability intra-procedurally from its entry to its exit along all the possible value flows established by its statements to identify its precision-critical variables/objects. In practice, this new modular object reachability analysis, which runs linearly in terms of the number of statements in the program, introduces again only a small loss of precision intokobj. We have validatedTurner$^{\mathcal{m}}$with an open-source implementation inSoot(already publicly available) against the state of the art by using a set of 12 widely used Java benchmarks and applications.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
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".