SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Haokun Li

Publications and source records attributed to Haokun Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Array-Carrying Symbolic Execution for Function Contract Generation

Function contract generation is a classical problem in program analysis that targets the automated analysis of functions in a program with multiple procedures. The problem is fundamental in inter-procedural analysis where properties of functions are first obtained via the generation of function contracts and then the generated contracts are used as building blocks to analyze the whole program. Typical objectives in function contract generation include pre-/post-conditions and assigns information (that specifies the modification information over program variables and memory segments during function execution). In programs with array manipulations, a crucial point in function contract generation is the treatment of array segments that imposes challenges in inferring invariants and assigns information over such segments. To address this challenge, we propose a novel symbolic execution framework that carries invariants and assigns information over contiguous segments of arrays. We implement our framework as a prototype within LLVM, and further integrate our prototype with the ACSL assertion format and the Frama-C software verification platform. Experimental evaluation over a variety of benchmarks from the literature and functions from realistic libraries shows that our framework is capable of handling array manipulating functions that indeed involve the carry of array information and are beyond existing approaches.

cs.PL

A Tale of 1001 LoC: Potential Runtime Error-Guided Specification Synthesis for Verifying Large-Scale Programs

Fully automated verification of large-scale software and hardware systems is arguably the holy grail of formal methods. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential for enhancing the degree of automation in formal verification by, e.g., generating formal specifications as essential to deductive verification, yet exhibit poor scalability due to long-context reasoning limitations and, more importantly, the difficulty of inferring complex, interprocedural specifications. This paper presents Preguss -- a modular, fine-grained framework for automating the generation and refinement of formal specifications. Preguss synergizes between static analysis and deductive verification by steering two components in a divide-and-conquer fashion: (i) potential runtime error-guided construction and prioritization of verification units, and (ii) LLM-aided synthesis of interprocedural specifications at the unit level. We show that Preguss substantially outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based approaches and, in particular, it enables highly automated RTE-freeness verification for real-world programs with over a thousand LoC, with a reduction of 80.6%~88.9% human verification effort.

cs.SE

Visual Room 2.0: Seeing is Not Understanding for MLLMs

Can multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) truly understand what they can see? Extending Searle's Chinese Room into the multi-modal domain, this paper proposes the Visual Room argument: MLLMs may describe every visual detail precisely yet fail to comprehend the underlying emotions and intentions, namely seeing is not understanding. Building on this, we introduce \textit{Visual Room} 2.0, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating perception-cognition alignment of MLLMs. We model human perceptive and cognitive processes across three levels: low, middle, and high, covering 17 representative tasks. The perception component ranges from attribute recognition to scene understanding, while the cognition component extends from textual entailment to causal and social reasoning. The dataset contains 350 multi-modal samples, each with six progressive questions (2,100 in total) spanning perception to cognition. Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art (SoTA) MLLMs, we highlight three key findings: (1) MLLMs exhibit stronger perceptual competence than cognitive ability (8.0\%$\uparrow$); (2) cognition appears not causally dependent on perception-based reasoning; and (3) cognition scales with model size, but perception does not consistently improve with larger variants. This work operationalizes Seeing $\ne$ Understanding as a testable hypothesis, offering a new paradigm from perceptual processing to cognitive reasoning in MLLMs. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LHK2003/PCBench.

cs.CL

Seeing is Not Understanding: A Benchmark on Perception-Cognition Disparities in Large Language Models

With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), they have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across a variety of vision-language tasks. However, current evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on objective visual question answering or captioning, inadequately assessing the models' ability to understand complex and subjective human emotions. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmoBench-Reddit, a novel, hierarchical benchmark for multimodal emotion understanding. The dataset comprises 350 meticulously curated samples from the social media platform Reddit, each containing an image, associated user-provided text, and an emotion category (sad, humor, sarcasm, happy) confirmed by user flairs. We designed a hierarchical task framework that progresses from basic perception to advanced cognition, with each data point featuring six multiple-choice questions and one open-ended question of increasing difficulty. Perception tasks evaluate the model's ability to identify basic visual elements (e.g., colors, objects), while cognition tasks require scene reasoning, intent understanding, and deep empathy integrating textual context. We ensured annotation quality through a combination of AI assistance (Claude 4) and manual verification.We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of nine leading MLLMs, including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-pro, and GPT-4o, on EmoBench-Reddit.

cs.CL

Sensitivity-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Deep Neural Networks

Model quantization reduces neural network parameter precision to achieve compression, but often compromises accuracy. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods employ iterative parameter updates to preserve accuracy under high compression ratios, incurring significant computational complexity and resource overhead, which limits applicability in resource-constrained edge computing and real-time inference scenarios. This paper proposes an efficient PTQ method guided by parameter sensitivity analysis. The approach prioritizes quantization of high-sensitivity parameters, leveraging unquantized low-sensitivity parameters to compensate for quantization errors, thereby mitigating accuracy degradation. Furthermore, by exploiting column-wise clustering of parameter sensitivity, the method introduces a row-parallel quantization framework with a globally shared inverse Hessian matrix update mechanism, reducing computational complexity by an order of magnitude. Experimental results on ResNet-50 and YOLOv5s demonstrate a 20-200-fold quantization speedup over the Optimal Brain Quantization baseline, with mean accuracy loss below 0.3%, confirming the method's efficacy in balancing efficiency and accuracy.

cs.CV

Preguss: It Analyzes, It Specifies, It Verifies

Fully automated verification of large-scale software and hardware systems is arguably the holy grail of formal methods. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential for enhancing the degree of automation in formal verification by, e.g., generating formal specifications as essential to deductive verification, yet exhibit poor scalability due to context-length limitations and, more importantly, the difficulty of inferring complex, interprocedural specifications. This paper outlines Preguss - a modular, fine-grained framework for automating the generation and refinement of formal specifications. Preguss synergizes between static analysis and deductive verification by orchestrating two components: (i) potential runtime error (RTE)-guided construction and prioritization of verification units, and (ii) LLM-aided synthesis of interprocedural specifications at the unit level. We envisage that Preguss paves a compelling path towards the automated verification of large-scale programs.

cs.SE

A Hybrid SMT-NRA Solver: Integrating 2D Cell-Jump-Based Local Search, MCSAT and OpenCAD

In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework for Satisfiability Modulo the Theory of Nonlinear Real Arithmetic (SMT-NRA for short). First, we introduce a two-dimensional cell-jump move, called \emph{$2d$-cell-jump}, generalizing the key operation, cell-jump, of the local search method for SMT-NRA. Then, we propose an extended local search framework, named \emph{$2d$-LS} (following the local search framework, LS, for SMT-NRA), integrating the model constructing satisfiability calculus (MCSAT) framework to improve search efficiency. To further improve the efficiency of MCSAT, we implement a recently proposed technique called \emph{sample-cell projection operator} for MCSAT, which is well suited for CDCL-style search in the real domain and helps guide the search away from conflicting states. Finally, we present a hybrid framework for SMT-NRA integrating MCSAT, $2d$-LS and OpenCAD, to improve search efficiency through information exchange. The experimental results demonstrate improvements in local search performance, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

cs.AI

Guiding Quantitative MRI Reconstruction with Phase-wise Uncertainty

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) requires multi-phase acqui-sition, often relying on reduced data sampling and reconstruction algorithms to accelerate scans, which inherently poses an ill-posed inverse problem. While many studies focus on measuring uncertainty during this process, few explore how to leverage it to enhance reconstruction performance. In this paper, we in-troduce PUQ, a novel approach that pioneers the use of uncertainty infor-mation for qMRI reconstruction. PUQ employs a two-stage reconstruction and parameter fitting framework, where phase-wise uncertainty is estimated during reconstruction and utilized in the fitting stage. This design allows uncertainty to reflect the reliability of different phases and guide information integration during parameter fitting. We evaluated PUQ on in vivo T1 and T2 mapping datasets from healthy subjects. Compared to existing qMRI reconstruction methods, PUQ achieved the state-of-the-art performance in parameter map-pings, demonstrating the effectiveness of uncertainty guidance. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PUQ-75B2/.

eess.IV

From Informal to Formal -- Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs

The research in AI-based formal mathematical reasoning has shown an unstoppable growth trend. These studies have excelled in mathematical competitions like IMO and have made significant progress. This paper focuses on formal verification, an immediate application scenario of formal reasoning, and breaks it down into sub-tasks. We constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages (Coq, Lean4, Dafny, ACSL, and TLA+) by distilling gpt-4o and evaluated against ten open-sourced LLMs, including recent popular DeepSeek-R1. We also fine-tuned several 7~8B small models to achieve comparable performance with Deepseek-R1-671B. Interestingly, we observed that fine-tuning with formal data also enhances mathematics, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Fine-tuned models are released at https: //huggingface.co/fm-universe.

cs.AI

Core Context Aware Transformers for Long Context Language Modeling

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable success in extensive tasks primarily attributed to self-attention mechanism, which requires a token to consider all preceding tokens as its context to compute attention. However, when the context length L becomes very large (e.g., 128K), the amount of potentially redundant information in the context tends to increase. The redundant context not only hampers the modeling representation performance but also incurs unnecessary computational and storage overhead. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play Core Context Aware (CCA) Attention for efficient long-context modeling, comprising two complementary modules: 1) Globality-aware pooling module groups input tokens and dynamically compresses each group into one core token based on their significance. In this way, our method automatically focuses and strengthens core context while diminishing redundancy during the learning process, leading to effective long-term dependency modeling. 2) Locality-preserving module incorporates neighboring tokens to preserve local context for detailed representation. Notably, our CCA-Attention is able to replace the self-attention module in existing LLMs with minimal fine-tuning cost. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our method in both long-context modeling and computational efficiency over state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CL

Enchanting Program Specification Synthesis by Large Language Models using Static Analysis and Program Verification

Formal verification provides a rigorous and systematic approach to ensure the correctness and reliability of software systems. Yet, constructing specifications for the full proof relies on domain expertise and non-trivial manpower. In view of such needs, an automated approach for specification synthesis is desired. While existing automated approaches are limited in their versatility, i.e., they either focus only on synthesizing loop invariants for numerical programs, or are tailored for specific types of programs or invariants. Programs involving multiple complicated data types (e.g., arrays, pointers) and code structures (e.g., nested loops, function calls) are often beyond their capabilities. To help bridge this gap, we present AutoSpec, an automated approach to synthesize specifications for automated program verification. It overcomes the shortcomings of existing work in specification versatility, synthesizing satisfiable and adequate specifications for full proof. It is driven by static analysis and program verification, and is empowered by large language models (LLMs). AutoSpec addresses the practical challenges in three ways: (1) driving \name by static analysis and program verification, LLMs serve as generators to generate candidate specifications, (2) programs are decomposed to direct the attention of LLMs, and (3) candidate specifications are validated in each round to avoid error accumulation during the interaction with LLMs. In this way, AutoSpec can incrementally and iteratively generate satisfiable and adequate specifications. The evaluation shows its effectiveness and usefulness, as it outperforms existing works by successfully verifying 79% of programs through automatic specification synthesis, a significant improvement of 1.592x. It can also be successfully applied to verify the programs in a real-world X509-parser project.

cs.SE

M2DA: Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer Incorporating Driver Attention for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has witnessed remarkable progress. However, the extensive deployment of autonomous vehicles has yet to be realized, primarily due to 1) inefficient multi-modal environment perception: how to integrate data from multi-modal sensors more efficiently; 2) non-human-like scene understanding: how to effectively locate and predict critical risky agents in traffic scenarios like an experienced driver. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Multi-Modal fusion transformer incorporating Driver Attention (M2DA) for autonomous driving. To better fuse multi-modal data and achieve higher alignment between different modalities, a novel Lidar-Vision-Attention-based Fusion (LVAFusion) module is proposed. By incorporating driver attention, we empower the human-like scene understanding ability to autonomous vehicles to identify crucial areas within complex scenarios precisely and ensure safety. We conduct experiments on the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance with less data in closed-loop benchmarks. Source codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/M2DA-4772.

cs.CV

Principles and Practices of Large-Scale Code Analysis at Ant Group: A Data- and Logic-Oriented Approach

Large-scale software development requires dynamic and multifaceted static code analysis that extends beyond the capabilities of traditional tools. Existing tools like CodeQL lack cross-language analysis capabilities and can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. We present CodeFuse-Query, a data system tailored for large-scale code analysis. First, CodeFuse-Query adopts a Logic-Oriented Computation Design, employing Datalog with a two-tiered schema, COREF, to convert source code into data facts, and Godel to express complex analysis tasks in logical terms. Furthermore, CodeFuse-Query adopts a Domain-Optimized System Design. This approach optimizes resource utilization, prioritizes data reusability, applies incremental code extraction, and introduces task-type characteristics specifically for code changes, underscoring its domain-optimized design. We present empirical results demonstrating CodeFuse-Query's robustness, scalability, and efficiency in large-scale real-world scenarios at Ant Group, where it serves as a core static analysis infrastructure. Deployed in production environments, CodeFuse-Query processes up to 10 billion lines of code daily across more than 300,000 distinct analysis tasks. CodeFuse-Query has been open-sourced.

cs.SE

Local Search for Solving Satisfiability of Polynomial Formulas

Satisfiability Modulo the Theory of Nonlinear Real Arithmetic, SMT(NRA) for short, concerns the satisfiability of polynomial formulas, which are quantifier-free Boolean combinations of polynomial equations and inequalities with integer coefficients and real variables. In this paper, we propose a local search algorithm for a special subclass of SMT(NRA), where all constraints are strict inequalities. An important fact is that, given a polynomial formula with $n$ variables, the zero level set of the polynomials in the formula decomposes the $n$-dimensional real space into finitely many components (cells) and every polynomial has constant sign in each cell. The key point of our algorithm is a new operation based on real root isolation, called cell-jump, which updates the current assignment along a given direction such that the assignment can `jump' from one cell to another. One cell-jump may adjust the values of several variables while traditional local search operations, such as flip for SAT and critical move for SMT(LIA), only change that of one variable. We also design a two-level operation selection to balance the success rate and efficiency. Furthermore, our algorithm can be easily generalized to a wider subclass of SMT(NRA) where polynomial equations linear with respect to some variable are allowed. Experiments show the algorithm is competitive with state-of-the-art SMT solvers, and performs particularly well on those formulas with high-degree polynomials.

cs.LO

Isolating Bounded and Unbounded Real Roots of a Mixed Trigonometric-Polynomial

Mixed trigonometric-polynomials (MTPs) are functions of the form $f(x,\sin{x}, \cos{x})$ with $f\in\mathbb{Q}[x_1,x_2,x_3]$. In this paper, an algorithm ``isolating" all the real roots of an MTP is provided and implemented. It automatically divides the real roots into two parts: one consists of finitely many ``bounded" roots in an interval $[μ_-,μ_+]$ while the other consists of probably countably many ``periodic" roots in $\mathbb{R}\backslash[μ_-,μ_+]$. For bounded roots, the algorithm returns isolating intervals and corresponding multiplicities while for periodic roots, it returns finitely many mutually disjoint small intervals $I_i\subset[-π,π]$, integers $c_i>0$ and multisets of root multiplicity $\{m_{j,i}\}_{j=1}^{c_i}$ such that any periodic root $t>μ_+$ is in the set $(\sqcup_i\cup_{k\in\mathbb{N}}(I_i+2kπ))$ and any interval $I_i+2kπ\subset(μ_+,\infty)$ contains exactly $c_i$ periodic roots with multiplicities $m_{1,i},...,m_{c_i,i}$, respectively. The effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm are shown by experiments. %In particular, our results indicate that the ``distributions" of the roots of an MTP in the ``periods" $(-π,π]+2kπ$ sufficiently far from $0$ share a same pattern. Besides, the method used to isolate the roots in $[μ_-,μ_+]$ is applicable to any other bounded interval as well. The algorithm takes advantages of the weak Fourier sequence technique and deals with the intervals period-by-period without scaling the coordinate so to keep the length of the sequence short. The new approaches can easily be modified to decide whether there is any root, or whether there are infinitely many roots in unbounded intervals of the form $(-\infty,a)$ or $(a,\infty)$ with $a\in\mathbb{Q}$.

cs.SC

Boost Test-Time Performance with Closed-Loop Inference

Conventional deep models predict a test sample with a single forward propagation, which, however, may not be sufficient for predicting hard-classified samples. On the contrary, we human beings may need to carefully check the sample many times before making a final decision. During the recheck process, one may refine/adjust the prediction by referring to related samples. Motivated by this, we propose to predict those hard-classified test samples in a looped manner to boost the model performance. However, this idea may pose a critical challenge: how to construct looped inference, so that the original erroneous predictions on these hard test samples can be corrected with little additional effort. To address this, we propose a general Closed-Loop Inference (CLI) method. Specifically, we first devise a filtering criterion to identify those hard-classified test samples that need additional inference loops. For each hard sample, we construct an additional auxiliary learning task based on its original top-$K$ predictions to calibrate the model, and then use the calibrated model to obtain the final prediction. Promising results on ImageNet (in-distribution test samples) and ImageNet-C (out-of-distribution test samples) demonstrate the effectiveness of CLI in improving the performance of any pre-trained model.

cs.CV

Square-free Strong Triangular Decomposition of Zero-dimensional Polynomial Systems

Triangular decomposition with different properties has been used for various types of problem solving, e.g. geometry theorem proving, real solution isolation of zero-dimensional polynomial systems, etc. In this paper, the concepts of strong chain and square-free strong triangular decomposition (SFSTD) of zero-dimensional polynomial systems are defined. Because of its good properties, SFSTD may be a key way to many problems related to zero-dimensional polynomial systems, such as real solution isolation and computing radicals of zero-dimensional ideals. Inspired by the work of Wang and of Dong and Mou, we propose an algorithm for computing SFSTD based on Gröbner bases computation. The novelty of the algorithm is that we make use of saturated ideals and separant to ensure that the zero sets of any two strong chains have no intersection and every strong chain is square-free, respectively. On one hand, we prove that the arithmetic complexity of the new algorithm can be single exponential in the square of the number of variables, which seems to be among the rare complexity analysis results for triangular-decomposition methods. On the other hand, we show experimentally that, on a large number of examples in the literature, the new algorithm is far more efficient than a popular triangular-decomposition method based on pseudo-division. Furthermore, it is also shown that, on those examples, the methods based on SFSTD for real solution isolation and for computing radicals of zero-dimensional ideals are very efficient.

cs.SC

Choosing the Variable Ordering for Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition via Exploiting Chordal Structure

Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) plays an important role in the field of real algebraic geometry and many other areas. As is well-known, the choice of variable ordering while computing CAD has a great effect on the time and memory use of the computation as well as the number of sample points computed. In this paper, we indicate that typical CAD algorithms, if executed with respect to a special kind of variable orderings (called "the perfect elimination orderings"), naturally preserve chordality, which is an important property on sparsity of variables. Experimentation suggests that if the associated graph of the polynomial system in question is chordal (\emph{resp.}, is nearly chordal), then a perfect elimination ordering of the associated graph (\emph{resp.}, of a minimal chordal completion of the associated graph) can be a good variable ordering for the CAD computation. That is, by using the perfect elimination orderings, the CAD computation may produce a much smaller full set of projection polynomials than by using other naive variable orderings. More importantly, for the complexity analysis of the CAD computation via a perfect elimination ordering, a so-called $(m,d)$-property of the full set of projection polynomials obtained via such an ordering is given, through which the "size" of this set is characterized. This property indicates that when the corresponding perfect elimination tree has a lower height, the full set of projection polynomials also tends to have a smaller "size". This is well consistent with the experimental results, hence the perfect elimination orderings with lower elimination tree height are further recommended to be used in the CAD projection.

cs.SC