{"id":1168974,"date":"2026-04-20T09:47:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/intent-aligned-formal-specification-synthesis-via-traceable-refinement\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T09:21:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T16:21:54","slug":"intent-aligned-formal-specification-synthesis-via-traceable-refinement","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/intent-aligned-formal-specification-synthesis-via-traceable-refinement\/","title":{"rendered":"Intent-aligned Formal Specification Synthesis via Traceable Refinement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Large language models are increasingly used to generate code from natural language, but ensuring correctness remains challenging. Formal verification offers a principled way to obtain such guarantees by proving that a program satisfies a formal specification. However, specifications are frequently missing in real-world codebases, and writing high-quality specifications remains expensive and expertise-intensive. We present VeriSpecGen, a traceable refinement framework that synthesizes intent-aligned specifications in Lean through requirement-level attribution and localized repair. VeriSpecGen decomposes natural language into atomic requirements and generates requirement-targeted tests with explicit traceability maps to validate generated specifications. When validation fails, traceability maps attribute failures to specific requirements, enabling targeted clause-level repairs. VeriSpecGen achieve 86.6% on VERINA SpecGen task using Claude Opus 4.5, improving over baselines by up to 31.8 points across different model families and scales. Beyond inference-time gains, we generate 343K training examples from VeriSpecGen refinement trajectories and demonstrate that training on these trajectories substantially improves specification synthesis by 62-106% relative and transfers gains to general reasoning abilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Large language models are increasingly used to generate code from natural language, but ensuring correctness remains challenging. Formal verification offers a principled way to obtain such guarantees by proving that a program satisfies a formal specification. However, specifications are frequently missing in real-world codebases, and writing high-quality specifications remains expensive and expertise-intensive. We present VeriSpecGen, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2026-04-12","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":false,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[{"provider":"s2","id":"80ec697e3d25d90d2478c9165becf837716f0e3e"},{"provider":"arxiv","id":"2604.10392"}],"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556,13560],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246691,246685],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1168974","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-machine-learning"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2026-04-12","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":0,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.10392","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"name","value":"Zhe Ye","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Aidan Z.H. Yang","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Huangyuan Su","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Zhenyu Liao","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Samuel Tenka","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Zhizhen Qin","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Udaya Ghai","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Dawn Song","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"name","value":"Soonho Kong","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[],"msr_project":[],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"miscellaneous","related_content":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1168974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1168974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170080,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1168974\/revisions\/1170080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1168974"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=1168974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}