Computation Tree Logic Guided Program Repair

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CTL-guided program repair framework using Datalog, capable of repairing infinite-state programs and avoiding overfitting, with significant improvements over existing methods.

Contribution

It extends Datalog-based analysis to support CTL properties and handles infinite computations, enabling more accurate and reliable program repairs.

Findings

Analysis accuracy of 56.6% on small benchmarks

Analysis accuracy of 88.5% on real-world benchmarks

Successfully repairs all detected bugs in experiments

Abstract

Temporal logics like Computation Tree Logic (CTL) have been widely used as expressive formalisms to capture rich behavioral specifications. CTL can express properties such as reachability, termination, invariants and responsiveness, which are difficult to test. This paper suggests a mechanism for the automated repair of infinite-state programs guided by CTL properties. Our produced patches avoid the overfitting issue that occurs in test-suite-guided repair, where the repaired code may not pass tests outside the given test suite. To realize this vision, we propose a repair framework based on Datalog, a widely used domain-specific language for program analysis, which readily supports nested fixed-point semantics of CTL via stratified negation. Specifically, our framework encodes the program and CTL properties into Datalog facts and rules and performs the repair by modifying the facts to pass the analysis rules. Previous research proposed a generic repair mechanism for Datalog-based analysis in the form of Symbolic Execution of Datalog (SEDL). However, SEDL only supports positive Datalog, which is insufficient for expressing CTL properties. Thus, we extended SEDL to make it applicable to stratified Datalog. Moreover, liveness property violations involve infinite computations, which we handle via a novel loop summarization. Our approach achieves analysis accuracy of 56.6% on a small-scale benchmark and 88.5% on a real-world benchmark, outperforming the best baseline performances of 27.7% and 76.9%. Our approach repairs all detected bugs, which is not achieved by existing tools.