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Efficient Pointer Analysis via Def-Use Graph Pruning

2025· article· W7125592821 on OpenAlexaff
J. M. He, Karim Ali

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, programming, and type systems
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPointer analysisPointer (user interface)AliasComputationDataflowGraphAbstract interpretation

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Precise pointer information is essential for dataflow analysis. While flow-sensitive pointer analysis yields highly precise results, it introduces more computations. To provide a better trade-off between precision and performance, prior work has developed LEVPA, a pointer analysis that processes pointers according to their pointer level, generally accelerating the analysis. However, LevPA still performs redundant computations for intermediate variables that are generated during Static Single Assignment (SSA) transformation. For real-world programs, we have observed that those variables may constitute up to 87 % of all analyzed variables. These unnecessary computations cause LEVPA to timeout for large programs. To address these limitations, we present Level-based Intermediate variable Skipping Pointer Analysis (LisPA), an enhancement of LevPA that operates on a def-use graph without computing points-to set of intermediate variables introduced during SSA transformation. The key insight behind LISPA is that intermediate variables do not introduce new pointers into the analysis, because they always alias with variables in the original program. Therefore, there is no need to compute their points-to set in a fixed-point computation. Across 27 real-world C/C++ programs, we show that LISPA is on average$2.14 \times$faster than LevPA, while using$2.38 \times$less memory.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.021

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.003
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.234 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

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".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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