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The success of the application of machine-learning techniques to compilation tasks can be largely attributed to the recent development and advancement of program characterization, a process that numerically or structurally quantifies a target program. While great achievements have been made in identifying key features to characterize programs, choosing a correct set of features for a specific compiler task remains an ad hoc procedure. In order to guarantee a comprehensive coverage of features, compiler engineers usually need to select excessive number of features. This, unfortunately, would potentially lead to a selection of multiple similar features, which in turn could create a new problem of bias that emphasizes certain aspects of a programs characteristics, hence reducing the accuracy and performance of the target compiler task. In this paper, we propose FEAture Selection for compilation Tasks (FEAST), an efficient and automated framework for determining the most relevant and representative features from a feature pool. Specifically, FEAST utilizes widely used statistics and machine-learning tools, including LASSO, sequential forward and backward selection, for automatic feature selection, and can in general be applied to any numerical feature set. This paper further proposes an automated approach to compiler parameter assignment for assessing the performance of FEAST. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that, under the compiler parameter assignment task, FEAST can achieve comparable results with about 18% of features that are automatically selected from the entire feature pool. We also inspect these selected features and discuss their roles in program execution.
We present a novel methodology for automated feature subset selection from a pool of physiological signals using Quantum Annealing (QA). As a case study, we will investigate the effectiveness of QA-based feature selection techniques in selecting the optimal feature subset for stress detection. Features are extracted from four signal sources: foot EDA, hand EDA, ECG, and respiration. The proposed method embeds the feature variables extracted from the physiological signals in a binary quadratic model. The bias of the feature variable is calculated using the Pearson correlation coefficient between the feature variable and the target variable. The weight of the edge connecting the two feature variables is calculated using the Pearson correlation coefficient between two feature variables in the binary quadratic model. Subsequently, D-Waves clique sampler is used to sample cliques from the binary quadratic model. The underlying solution is then re-sampled to obtain multiple good solutions and the clique with the lowest energy is returned as the optimal solution. The proposed method is compared with commonly used feature selection techniques for stress detection. Results indicate that QA-based feature subset selection performed equally as that of classical techniques. However, under data uncertainty conditions such as limited training data, the performance of quantum annealing for selecting optimum features remained unaffected, whereas a significant decrease in performance is observed with classical feature selection techniques. Preliminary results show the promise of quantum annealing in optimizing the training phase of a machine learning classifier, especially under data uncertainty conditions.
Automated compilation error repair, the problem of suggesting fixes to buggy programs that fail to compile, has generated significant interest in recent years. Apart from being a tool of general convenience, automated code repair has significant pedagogical applications for novice programmers who find compiler error messages cryptic and unhelpful. Existing approaches largely solve this problem using a blackbox-application of a heavy-duty generative learning technique, such as sequence-to-sequence prediction (TRACER) or reinforcement learning (RLAssist). Although convenient, such black-box application of learning techniques makes existing approaches bulky in terms of training time, as well as inefficient at targeting specific error types. We present MACER, a novel technique for accelerated error repair based on a modular segregation of the repair process into repair identification and repair application. MACER uses powerful yet inexpensive discriminative learning techniques such as multi-label classifiers and rankers to first identify the type of repair required and then apply the suggested repair. Experiments indicate that the fine-grained approach adopted by MACER offers not only superior error correction, but also much faster training and prediction. On a benchmark dataset of 4K buggy programs collected from actual student submissions, MACER outperforms existing methods by 20% at suggesting fixes for popular errors that exactly match the fix desired by the student. MACER is also competitive or better than existing methods at all error types -- whether popular or rare. MACER offers a training time speedup of 2x over TRACER and 800x over RLAssist, and a test time speedup of 2-4x over both.
Program synthesis from input-output examples has been a long-standing challenge, and recent works have demonstrated some success in designing deep neural networks for program synthesis. However, existing efforts in input-output neural program synthesis have been focusing on domain-specific languages, thus the applicability of previous approaches to synthesize code in full-fledged popular programming languages, such as C, remains a question. The main challenges lie in two folds. On the one hand, the program search space grows exponentially when the syntax and semantics of the programming language become more complex, which poses higher requirements on the synthesis algorithm. On the other hand, increasing the complexity of the programming language also imposes more difficulties on data collection, since building a large-scale training set for input-output program synthesis require random program generators to sample programs and input-output examples. In this work, we take the first step to synthesize C programs from input-output examples. In particular, we propose LaSynth, which learns the latent representation to approximate the execution of partially generated programs, even if their semantics are not well-defined. We demonstrate the possibility of synthesizing elementary C code from input-output examples, and leveraging learned execution significantly improves the prediction performance over existing approaches. Meanwhile, compared to the randomly generated ground-truth programs, LaSynth synthesizes more concise programs that resemble human-written code. We show that training on these synthesized programs further improves the prediction performance for both Karel and C program synthesis, indicating the promise of leveraging the learned program synthesizer to improve the dataset quality for input-output program synthesis.
We present a self-certifying compiler for the COGENT systems language. COGENT is a restricted, polymorphic, higher-order, and purely functional language with linear types and without the need for a trusted runtime or garbage collector. It compiles to efficient C code that is designed to interoperate with existing C functions. The language is suited for layered systems code with minimal sharing such as file systems or network protocol control code. For a well-typed COGENT program, the compiler produces C code, a high-level shallow embedding of its semantics in Isabelle/HOL, and a proof that the C code correctly implements this embedding. The aim is for proof engineers to reason about the full semantics of real-world systems code productively and equationally, while retaining the interoperability and leanness of C. We describe the formal verification stages of the compiler, which include automated formal refinement calculi, a switch from imperative update semantics to functional value semantics formally justified by the linear type system, and a number of standard compiler phases such as type checking and monomorphisation. The compiler certificate is a series of language-level meta proofs and per-program translation validation phases, combined into one coherent top-level theorem in Isabelle/HOL.
Proving only over source code that programs do not leak sensitive data leaves a gap between reasoning and reality that can only be filled by accounting for the behaviour of the compiler. Furthermore, software does not always have the luxury of limiting itself to single-threaded computation with resources statically dedicated to each user to ensure the confidentiality of their data. This results in mixed-sensitivity concurrent programs, which might reuse memory shared between their threads to hold data of different sensitivity levels at different times; for such programs, a compiler must preserve the value-dependent coordination of such mixed-sensitivity reuse despite the impact of concurrency. Here we demonstrate, using Isabelle/HOL, that it is feasible to verify that a compiler preserves noninterference, the strictest kind of confidentiality property, for mixed-sensitivity concurrent programs. First, we present notions of refinement that preserve a concurrent value-dependent notion of noninterference that we have designed to support such programs. As proving noninterference-preserving refinement can be considerably more complex than the standard refinements typically used to verify semantics -- preserving compilation, our notions include a decomposition principle that separates the semantics -- from the security-preservation concerns. Second, we demonstrate that these refinement notions are applicable to verified secure compilation, by exercising them on a single-pass compiler for mixed-sensitivity concurrent programs that synchronise using mutex locks, from a generic imperative language to a generic RISC-style assembly language. Finally, we execute our compiler on a nontrivial mixed-sensitivity concurrent program modelling a real-world use case, thus preserving its source-level noninterference properties down to an assembly-level model automatically. (See paper for complete abstract.)