Generating formal specifications for C programs remains a challenge in formal verification due to the manual effort, expertise, and semantic precision required. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer promise in automating specification synthesis, current approaches often lack semantic depth and produce unverifiable or incomplete contracts. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoACSL, a novel framework that integrates LLM prompting with semantic features extracted from Code Property Graphs (CPGs). AutoACSL performs static analyses to extract key semantic elements, including arithmetic operations, loop and recursion structures, and return value propagation, which are encoded into structured prompts. These prompts enable the LLM not only to generate normal behavioral specifications but also to include constraints that prevent inputs leading to runtime errors. AutoACSL employs a feedback-driven synthesis loop, where candidate specifications are verified using Frama-C/WP and refined iteratively until verification succeeds or a termination condition is met. Evaluated on 604 programs drawn from diverse datasets, AutoACSL achieves a 98% specification generation success ratio and a 96% full proof ratio when paired with Gemini-3. Compared to a code-only baseline, AutoACSL improves the full proof ratio by 24.7% to 51.7% across four LLMs (GPT-o4 Mini, GPT-5.2, Grok-4.1, and Gemini-3), demonstrating that integrating large language models with CPG-based static analysis substantially enhances both generation robustness and verification effectiveness for automated ACSL specification synthesis.
Eric Spencer, Arslan Bisharat, Brian Ortiz +6cs.SE cs.AI cs.LG cs.LO
TLA+ is a formal specification language for verifying distributed systems and safety-critical protocols. Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce TLA+ specifications that fail the TLC model checker for semantic reasons. Across 25 LLMs, the best public baseline is 26.6% syntactic parse and 8.6% semantic model-check. We present TLA-Prover, a 20-billion-parameter model for TLA+ specification synthesis. Training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified examples with repair-based group-relative policy optimization (GRPO). In the GRPO stage, the model learns to fix its own rejected specifications. We also train a direct preference optimization (DPO) variant from the same SFT checkpoint as an ablation. TLC provides the reward signal directly, with no learned reward model. Four tiers grade each output: Bronze (parses), Silver (no warnings), Gold (passes TLC), and Diamond. To reach Diamond, the model's correctness property is automatically altered in a small way; TLC must then detect a violation. If TLC still passes, the property was always-true and contributes nothing; the output fails Diamond. TLA-Prover reaches 9/30 (i.e. pass@1 = 30%) at both Gold and Diamond on a held-out 30-problem benchmark. This is roughly 3.5x the 8.6% untuned baseline. The DPO variant reaches 20% at Diamond. Gold and Diamond coincide at every checkpoint; this prevents the trivial-property failure mode.