Jul 2026· Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference· pp. 3180-3189· 0 citations· 26 references
Abstract
Deep learning (DL) compilers such as Apache TVM translate high-level models into optimized low-level code through multi-stage compilation pipelines. While recent testing efforts have improved fuzzing of optimization stages, they still face two key challenges: (i) the lack of semantics-preserving test models, leading to low validity, and (ii) coarse-grained input generation that fails to trigger hard-to-reach compiler components. To address these limitations, we propose CovCraft, a unified testing framework that integrates constraint-driven model generation with large language model (LLM)-guided input adaptation. CovCraft constructs diverse and valid ONNX models via symbolic constraint encoding and SMT solving, and then iteratively refines inputs using LLM-guided prompts to target uncovered functions, enabling the activation of rarely executed code paths. We evaluate CovCraft on TVM and observe consistent improvements over state-of-the-art techniques: it increases branch and function coverage by 8.9% and 7.0%, respectively, and detects 8 bugs. Moreover, the LLM-guided component achieves an 83.75% success rate in covering designated target functions, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining constraint-based generation with adaptive LLM reasoning for DL compiler testing. The prototype implementation of CovCraft is publicly available at: https://github.com/duduhedangdang/CovCraft.
Deep learning compilers (DLCs) are designed to translate deep learning programs into optimized, hardware-specific code. Typically, DLC frontends translate programs into graph-based intermediate representations (IRs) to enable optimizations. Defects introduced during this stage (termed \emph{fBug}s) are severe yet understudied, as prior work predominantly focuses on low-level APIs and operators or treats DLCs as monolithic entities. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first systematic empirical study of \emph{fBug}s in TorchDynamo, the default DLC frontend for PyTorch 2, the most popular DL framework. Leveraging a domain-knowledge-enhanced LLM-aided methodology, we analyze 123 \emph{fBug}s and construct a taxonomy comprising 7 root cause categories and 15 subcategories. Our findings provide actionable insights for DLC development and testing. Furthermore, we leverage the LLM to generate targeted, root cause-aware test cases to detect new bugs. We uncovered 23 previously unknown \emph{fBug}s in recent releases (15 confirmed) across eight (sub)categories, demonstrating the efficacy of our methodology in testing and hardening DLC frontends.
This work introduces a search-based approach that identifies and evolves a set of natural language transformation rules with strong downstream effects on coding performance, and proposes DUALFIX, a staged repair pipeline that combines the evolved transformation rules with execution-feedback repair, addressing both specification-level and implementation-level failures.
Amal Akli, Melissa Akli, Cedric Richter et al.· 0 citations
Evaluating SEDCoT on a public COBOL-to-C dataset demonstrates that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by at least 12% while producing translations with substantially higher readability than rule-based alternatives.
Phillip Entin, Wenchao Gu, Alexander Knapp et al.· 0 citations
PerfAgent is presented, a profiler-guided, verifier-in-the-loop workflow that gives an off-the-shelf coding agent the feedback needed to find real hotspots, improve beyond the first passing patch, and use profiler evidence rather than timing alone to decide what to optimize next.
Ryan Deng, Yuanzhe Liu, Bastian Lipka et al.· 2 citations
The growing complexity of modern chips poses significant challenges to hardware verification. In recent years, coverage-guided fuzzing has emerged as a promising approach for improving verification efficiency. However, existing hardware fuzzers still struggle to achieve high coverage and expose corner-case bugs, as they predominantly rely on heuristic strategies with limited ability to reason about the internal logic and semantic behavior of the design under test (DUT). In this work, we propose ChipFuzzer, a hardware fuzzing framework that leverages the semantic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to improve fuzzing effectiveness. ChipFuzzer adopts a dual-stage workflow comprising a Coverage-Guided stage and a Bug-Guided stage. In the Coverage-Guided stage, ChipFuzzer employs control-flow similarity and discrepancy analysis to guide LLM-driven testcase generation, thereby improving coverage. In the Bug-Guided stage, ChipFuzzer leverages historical bug data to identify bug-prone code regions and prioritize testcase generation for those regions, thus enhancing bug discovery efficiency. Experimental results on three open-source CPU designs show that ChipFuzzer improves average condition coverage by 5.8 percentage points and bug detection rate by 21.1 percentage points over the strongest baseline.
Kun Wang, Cangyuan Li, Kaiyan Chang et al.· 0 citations
Differential compiler testing requires automatically generated programs that are not only diverse and bug-revealing, but also semantically well-defined and reproducible. Rule-based generators provide strong validity guarantees but offer limited control over semantic variation, while large language models (LLMs) can synthesize expressive programs without principled mechanisms for balancing competing testing objectives. This paper proposes LMOEC, a constrained multi-objective evolutionary framework that integrates code language models as semantic genetic operators within an NSGA-II search process. Instead of using the LLM as a one-shot generator, we employ it for population initialization, crossover, and mutation at the program level, enabling semantics-aware recombination while preserving strict admissibility constraints. Compiler test generation is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously promotes structural diversity, cross-configuration output inconsistency, semantic complexity, and robustness to mutation. A constraint-driven acceptance pipeline enforces syntactic validity, deterministic execution, bounded runtime, and avoidance of undefined behavior before evolutionary selection. By maintaining a Pareto front of non-dominated programs, LMOEC preserves multiple high-value test archetypes reflecting different trade-offs between bug exposure and reproducibility. The framework demonstrates how expressive code models can be systematically embedded into evolutionary multi-objective optimization for reliability-critical software testing.
Lang Hong Nguyet Anh, Ho Viet Duc Luong, Vu Van An· Annual Conference on Genetic...· 0 citations