AutoICE: Automatically Synthesizing Verifiable C Code via LLM-driven Evolution
This addresses the challenge of software correctness and reliability for developers by enabling more effective autoformalization, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing LLM-based efforts with evolutionary techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically synthesizing verifiable C code from natural language requirements by proposing AutoICE, an LLM-driven evolutionary search method, which achieves a 90.36% verification success rate, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach.
Automatically synthesizing verifiable code from natural language requirements ensures software correctness and reliability while significantly lowering the barrier to adopting the techniques of formal methods. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), long-standing efforts at autoformalization have gained new momentum. However, existing approaches suffer from severe syntactic and semantic errors due to the scarcity of domain-specific pre-training corpora and often fail to formalize implicit knowledge effectively. In this paper, we propose AutoICE, an LLM-driven evolutionary search for synthesizing verifiable C code. It introduces the diverse individual initialization and the collaborative crossover to enable diverse iterative updates, thereby mitigating error propagation inherent in single-agent iterations. Besides, it employs the self-reflective mutation to facilitate the discovery of implicit knowledge. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoICE: it successfully verifies $90.36$\% of code, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach. Besides, on a developer-friendly dataset variant, AutoICE achieves a $88.33$\% verification success rate, significantly surpassing the $65$\% success rate of the SOTA approach.