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IDS Seminar: Neuro-Symbolic Static Analysis for Reliable Software Systems

Title: Neuro-Symbolic Static Analysis for Reliable Software Systems
Speaker: Dr. Chengpeng Wang, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Purdue University
Date: December 16, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Venue: IDS Seminar Room, P603, Graduate House / Zoom 
Mode: Hybrid. Seats for on-site participants are limited. A confirmation email will be sent to participants who have successfully registered.

Abstract

Static analysis is fundamental to program debugging and security auditing. Traditional techniques, such as data-flow analysis and symbolic execution, facilitate the automatic detection of software bugs, thereby greatly enhancing software reliability. However, their reliance on compilation processes and limited customization capabilities often impede practical adoption in real-world applications. In this talk, I will introduce a new paradigm of static analysis, named the neuro-symbolic approach, and present two recent works, LLMSAN and LLMDFA, which enable customizable, compilation-free analysis. Unlike conventional analyzers, LLMSAN and LLMDFA empower users to customize analyses via prompts and leverage large language models (LLMs) to interpret program semantics without requiring compilation. To address LLM hallucinations, they incorporate a series of parsing-based validators and an SMT solver to validate data-flow paths, ensuring the high quality of bug reports. Our techniques have identified 26 previously unknown memory corruption across 15 real-world software systems, including programs up to 400K lines of code. 

Speaker

Dr. Chengpeng Wang
Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Purdue University

Chengpeng Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Purdue University, working with Professor Xiangyu Zhang. He obtained the Ph.D. degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023, under the supervision of Professor Charles Zhang. His research mainly focuses on the use of program analysis, especially static analysis, to improve software reliability and performance. He is also interested in the intersection of machine learning techniques and symbolic analysis techniques. His contributions to the field have been recognized through publications in esteemed conferences and journals on programming languages, software engineering, and systems. He has been awarded the SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award (2022) and the ASPLOS Best Paper Award (2024). He received his BEng and MPhil degrees from Tsinghua University, in 2016 and 2019, respectively. 

For full biography of Dr. Wang, please refer to: https://chengpeng-wang.github.io/

Moderator

Prof. Ho Chen
Chair Professor, HKU IDS & Department of Computer Science, School of Computing and Data Science, HKU 
Prof. Chen received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research interests are computer security, machine learning, and program analysis and testing. He directs the JC STEM Lab of Intelligent Cybersecurity. He is a fellow of IEEE.

For full biography of Prof. Chen, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/ho-chen/

For information, please contact:
Email: datascience@hku.hk