Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Connecting Program Synthesis And Reachability: Automatic Program Repair Using Test-Input Generation, Thanhvu Nguyen, Westley Weimer, Deepak Kapur, Stephanie Forrest

CSE Technical Reports

We prove that certain formulations of program synthesis and reachability are equivalent. Specifically, our constructive proof shows the reductions between the template-based synthesis problem, which generates a program in a pre-specified form, and the reachability problem, which decides the reachability of a program location. This establishes a link between the two research fields and allows for the transfer of techniques and results between them.

To demonstrate the equivalence, we develop a program repair prototype using reachability tools. We transform a buggy program and its required specification into a specific program containing a location reachable only when the original program can …