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George Granberry

Publications and source records attributed to George Granberry.

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Seeking Specifications: The Case for Neuro-Symbolic Specification Synthesis

This work is concerned with the generation of formal specifications from code, using Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with symbolic methods. Concretely, in our study, the programming language is C, the specification language is ACSL, and the LLM is Deepseek-R1. In this context, we address two research directions, namely the specification of intent vs. implementation on the one hand, and the combination of symbolic analyses with LLMs on the other hand. For the first, we investigate how the absence or presence of bugs in the code impacts the generated specifications, as well as whether and how a user can direct the LLM to specify intent or implementation, respectively. For the second, we investigate the impact of results from symbolic analyses on the specifications generated by the LLM. The LLM prompts are augmented with outputs from two formal methods tools in the Frama-C ecosystem, Pathcrawler and EVA. We demonstrate how the addition of symbolic analysis to the workflow impacts the quality of annotations.

cs.SE

Lemmanaid: Neuro-Symbolic Lemma Conjecturing

Mathematicians and computer scientists are increasingly leveraging proof assistants to formalize and check complex proofs, a task that demands substantial expertise. Can we lower the bar by automating the conjecturing of helpful, interesting and novel lemmas? We present the first neuro-symbolic lemma conjecturing tool, LEMMANAID, designed to discover conjectures by drawing analogies between mathematical theories. LEMMANAID uses a fine-tuned LLM to generate lemma templates that describe the shape of a lemma, and symbolic methods to fill in the details. We compare LEMMANAID against the same LLM fine-tuned to generate lemmas directly, as well as a fully symbolic conjecturing method. On test sets from Isabelle's HOL library and Archive of Formal Proofs (AFP), LEMMANAID consistently outperforms both neural and symbolic methods. Using DeepSeek-coder-6.7B as a backend, LEMMANAID discovers 50% (HOL) and 29% (AFP) of the gold standard lemmas, increasing to 55% and 35% when ensembling prompting strategies. In a case study on Octonions, LEMMANAID discovers 79% of the gold standard lemmas, compared to 62% for neural-only and 23% for the state of the art symbolic tool. Furthermore, in a targeted comparison, LEMMANAID discovers more gold standard lemmas than both Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. Our results show that LEMMANAID can conjecture a significant number of interesting lemmas across complex formalizations in mathematics and computer science.

cs.AI

Specify What? Enhancing Neural Specification Synthesis by Symbolic Methods

We investigate how combinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and symbolic analyses can be used to synthesise specifications of C programs. The LLM prompts are augmented with outputs from two formal methods tools in the Frama-C ecosystem, Pathcrawler and EVA, to produce C program annotations in the specification language ACSL. We demonstrate how the addition of symbolic analysis to the workflow impacts the quality of annotations: information about input/output examples from Pathcrawler produce more context-aware annotations, while the inclusion of EVA reports yields annotations more attuned to runtime errors. In addition, we show that the method infers rather the programs intent than its behaviour, by generating specifications for buggy programs and observing robustness of the result against bugs.

cs.SE