Automatic instantiation of assurance cases from patterns using large language models
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
An assurance case is a structured set of arguments supported by evidence, demonstrating that a system’s non-functional requirements (e.g., safety, security, reliability) have been correctly implemented. Assurance case patterns serve as templates derived from previous successful assurance cases, aimed at facilitating the creation of new assurance cases. Despite using these patterns to generate assurance cases, their instantiation remains a largely manual and error-prone process that heavily relies on domain expertise. Thus, exploring techniques to support their automatic instantiation becomes crucial. This study aims to investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating the generation of assurance cases that comply with specific patterns. Specifically, we formalize assurance case patterns using predicate-based rules and then utilize LLMs, i.e., GPT-4o and GPT-4 Turbo, to automatically instantiate assurance cases from these formalized patterns. Our findings suggest that LLMs can generate assurance cases that comply with the given patterns. However, this study also highlights that LLMs may struggle with understanding some nuances related to pattern-specific relationships. While LLMs exhibit potential in the automatic generation of assurance cases, their capabilities still fall short compared to human experts. Therefore, a semi-automatic approach to instantiating assurance cases may be more practical at this time. • We rely on predicate-based logic to formalize GSN-compliant assurance case patterns. • We feed formalized pattern(s) to LLM(s) to derive an assurance case from it. • Our experiments assess the ability of LLMs to create assurance cases from patterns. • Results show LLMs can create assurance cases that comply with the given pattern.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it