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Laurel: Unblocking Automated Verification with Large Language Models

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arxiv 2405.16792 v2 pith:ZTWJ425E submitted 2024-05-27 cs.LO cs.AI

Laurel: Unblocking Automated Verification with Large Language Models

classification cs.LO cs.AI
keywords assertionslaurelllmsassertionburdendafnylanguagelarge
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Program verifiers such as Dafny automate proofs by outsourcing them to an SMT solver. This automation is not perfect, however, and the solver often requires hints in the form of assertions, creating a burden for the proof engineer. In this paper, we propose Laurel, a tool that alleviates this burden by automatically generating assertions using large language models (LLMs). To improve the success rate of LLMs in this task, we design two domain-specific prompting techniques. First, we help the LLM determine the location of the missing assertion by analyzing the verifier's error message and inserting an assertion placeholder at that location. Second, we provide the LLM with example assertions from the same codebase, which we select based on a new proof similarity metric. We evaluate our techniques on our new benchmark DafnyGym, a dataset of complex lemmas we extracted from three real-world Dafny codebases. Our evaluation shows that Laurel is able to generate over 56.6\% of the required assertions given only a few attempts, making LLMs an affordable tool for unblocking program verifiers without human intervention.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Inductive Deductive Synthesis: Enabling AI to Generate Formally Verified Systems

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    IDS is an agentic LLM system that incrementally synthesizes both implementation and proof for distributed key-value stores, succeeding on all 7 specs where prior agents succeeded on only 2.

  2. SpecRL: Reinforcement Learning with Test-Based Completeness Rewards for Formal Specification Synthesis

    cs.SE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Reinforcement learning with spectest completeness rewards lifts a 7B model’s Dafny specification verification success and completeness over supervised fine-tuning by about 50% and 26%.

  3. VeruSAGE: A Study of Agent-Based Verification for Rust Systems

    cs.OS 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LLM agents complete over 80% of tasks on a new 849-task Rust verification benchmark and over 90% on unfinished human proofs.

  4. Automating Formal Verification with Reinforcement Learning and Recursive Inference

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    RLVR training raises verified Dafny pass rates from 9.7% to 31.1% on a filtered benchmark while a Lean proof scaffold lifts success from 46.2% to 69.2% on a pilot set and solves 7 of 42 prior unsolved tasks.

  5. SpecRL: Reinforcement Learning with Test-Based Completeness Rewards for Formal Specification Synthesis

    cs.SE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SpecRL uses the fraction of negative tests rejected by candidate specifications as a reward signal in RL training to produce stronger and more verifiable formal specifications than prior methods.

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