Beatriz Souza

dblp:251/2069 · DBLP profile ↗
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4ranked-venue papers
3as first author
3since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-7978-719XORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Treefix: Enabling Execution with a Tree of Prefixes
abstract
The ability to execute code is a prerequisite for various dynamic program analyses. Learning-guided execution has been proposed as an approach to enable the execution of arbitrary code snippets by letting a neural model predict likely values for any missing variables. Although state-of-the-art learning-guided execution approaches, such as LExecutor, can enable the execution of a relative high amount of code, they are limited to predicting a restricted set of possible values and do not use any feedback from previous executions to execute even more code. This paper presents Treefix, a novel learning-guided execution approach that leverages LLMs to iteratively create code prefixes that enable the execution of a given code snippet. The approach addresses the problem in a multi-step fashion, where each step uses feedback about the code snippet and its execution to instruct an LLM to improve a previously generated prefix. This process iteratively creates a tree of prefixes, a subset of which is returned to the user as prefixes that maximize the number of executed lines in the code snippet. In our experiments with two datasets of Python code snippets, Treefix achieves 25% and 7% more coverage relative to the current state of the art in learning-guided execution, covering a total of 84% and 82% of all lines in the code snippets.
Beatriz Souza, Michael Pradel
ICSE1
2023 LExecutor: Learning-Guided Execution
abstract
Executing code is essential for various program analysis tasks, e.g., to detect bugs that manifest through exceptions or to obtain execution traces for further dynamic analysis. How- ever, executing an arbitrary piece of code is often difficult in practice, e.g., because of missing variable definitions, miss- ing user inputs, and missing third-party dependencies. This paper presents LExecutor, a learning-guided approach for executing arbitrary code snippets in an underconstrained way. The key idea is to let a neural model predict missing values that otherwise would cause the program to get stuck, and to inject these values into the execution. For example, LExecutor injects likely values for otherwise undefined vari- ables and likely return values of calls to otherwise missing functions. We evaluate the approach on Python code from popular open-source projects and on code snippets extracted from Stack Overflow. The neural model predicts realistic values with an accuracy between 79.5% and 98.2%, allowing LExecutor to closely mimic real executions. As a result, the approach successfully executes significantly more code than any available technique, such as simply executing the code as-is. For example, executing the open-source code snippets as-is covers only 4.1% of all lines, because the code crashes early on, whereas LExecutor achieves a coverage of 51.6%.
Beatriz Souza, Michael Pradel
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE1
2021 Identifying method-level mutation subsumption relations using Z3
Rohit Gheyi, Márcio Ribeiro 0001, Beatriz Souza, Marcio Augusto Guimarães, Leonardo Fernandes, Marcelo d'Amorim, Vander Alves, Leopoldo Teixeira, Baldoino Fonseca dos Santos Neto
Inf. Softw. Technol.3
2020 Identifying Mutation Subsumption Relations
abstract
One recent promising direction in reducing costs of mutation analysis is to identify redundant mutations. We propose a technique to discover redundant mutations by proving subsumption relations among method-level mutation operators using weak mutation testing. We conceive and encode a theory of subsumption relations in Z3 for 40 mutation targets (mutations of an expression or statement). Then we prove a number of subsumption relations using the Z3 theorem prover, and reduce the number of mutations in a number of mutation targets. MuJava-M includes some subsumption relations in MuJava. We apply MuJava and MuJava-M to 187 classes of 17 projects. Our approach correctly discards mutations in 74.97% of the cases, and reduces the number of mutations by 72.52%.
Beatriz Souza
ASE1