Automated Test Generation
Momentum
7 papers in the last four weeks, up 133% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 84
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) require extensive testing in simulation, but test case generation for driving scenarios is laborious. The desired scenarios are often out-of-distribution and have precise requirements on interactions with the AV policy under test. Manually programming scenarios allows for precise controllability but is difficult to scale. On the other hand, statistical models can leverage compute and data, but struggle with precise controllability when out-of-distribution. We cast scenario orchestration as a constraint-solving problem and present a language-in, simulation-out scenario orchestrator for closed-loop testing AVs. Our approach leverages foundation model reasoning to translate general, natural language descriptions into a set of constraints as a scenario representation. This then allows us to leverage off the shelf solvers to solve for actor behaviors which meet precise testing intentions in closed-loop. Under a benchmark of carefully crafted and diverse scenario descriptions, our approach greatly outperforms our baselines in orchestration success rate. We further show that our closed-loop approach is especially important for scenarios which require ego-reactive specifications.
FunFuzz: An LLM-Powered Evolutionary Fuzzing Framework
Modern fuzzers increasingly use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate structured inputs, but LLM-driven fuzzing is sensitive to prompt initialization and sampling variance, which can reduce exploration efficiency and lead to redundant inputs. We present FunFuzz, a multi-island evolutionary fuzzing framework that runs several isolated searches in parallel and periodically migrates high-value candidates to maintain diversity. FunFuzz derives initial generation prompts from documentation and initializes islands with topic-specific instructions, then continuously adapts prompts using feedback-guided selection. During fuzzing, candidates are prioritized by incremental compiler coverage, while compiler-internal failure signals are used to identify crash-inducing inputs. We evaluate FunFuzz on compiler fuzzing, where inputs are source programs and success is measured by compiler coverage and unique compiler-internal failures. Across repeated 24-hour campaigns on GCC and Clang, FunFuzz achieves higher compiler coverage than previous LLM-driven baselines and discovers more unique failure-triggering inputs.
Practical Limits of Autonomous Test Repair: A Multi-Agent Case Study with LLM-Driven Discovery and Self-Correction
Maintaining reliable UI test suites in large-scale enterprise applications is a persistent and costly challenge. We present an industrial case study of a multi-agent autonomous testing system evaluated using anonymized execution data from a production-like enterprise UI testing prototype. The application features several hundred dynamic UI elements per screen. Built on a large language model with LangGraph orchestration, Playwright execution, and a RAG knowledge base, the system evolves from human-directed testing toward High-autonomy feature discovery and test execution: given no explicit test targets, it discovers over 100 testable features across 10 UI screens, dynamically expands coverage by an additional 15--30 features through runtime DOM analysis, and iteratively repairs failing tests without human intervention. We analyzed 300 consecutive autonomous execution reports encompassing 636 individual test-case executions across 10 distinct scenario families. The system achieved a 70% repair convergence rate at the scenario-family level, with a mean of 3.4 repair iterations to convergence. However, only 10% of scenario families succeeded on first attempt, 38% of reports failed to produce any executable test artifact, and we documented concrete instances of assertion weakening and test-case deletion used as workaround mechanisms to achieve superficial convergence. Our findings show that unrestricted autonomy leads to unstable and often misleading outcomes, while constrained autonomy transforms such systems into operationally viable workflows. Rather than advocating full autonomy, our findings suggest that reliable autonomous testing in enterprise-scale settings requires explicit constraints, validation boundaries, and human oversight to preserve semantic correctness and operational trustworthiness.
FeedbackLLM: Metadata driven Multi-Agentic Language Agnostic Test Case Generator with Evolving prompt and Coverage Feedback
Traditional approaches to test case generation often involve manual effort and incur significant computational overhead. Additionally, these approaches are not scalable, and hence, unsuitable for complex software systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to software testing. However, single-shot prompt engineering-based approaches tend to hallucinate and generate redundant test cases, resulting in fewer branches. To handle the above-mentioned limitations, in this paper, we propose FeedbackLLM, a novel automated language-agnostic test case generation framework based on tightly coupled two-stage approach. In the first stage, FeedbackLLM extracts the input constraints by parsing source code and generates the possible test cases. The quality of the test cases is evaluated in the second stage by the following two specialized LLM feedback agents: (i) Line Feedback Agent: extracts the metadata related to missed line executions and (ii) Branch Feedback Agent: extracts the metadata of the unexecuted branch conditions. The above agents operate in a two-stage process, communicating in tandem, and this procedure is repeated for k-steps. Further, we also introduced a redundancy prevention cache to avoid duplicate API requests and avoid unnecessary execution cycles. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated on the standard benchmark programs related to C and Python programs. FeedbackLLM demonstrated more line and branch coverage than baseline tools while scaling linearly in execution time.
PPO guided Agentic Pipeline for Adaptive Prompt Selection and Test Case Generation
Developing effective test cases capable of thoroughly exercising large-scale software systems is inherently difficult, especially if such systems have voluminous, complex, and deeply nested source codes. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating test cases using a reinforcement learning-driven agentic framework where Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is coupled with an LLM engine to guide prompt selection during test generation. Our approach consists of two phases. In Phase I, the ToT-guided optimization agent partitions and minimizes the source code by removing redundancies without changing the functional behavior of the source code. In Phase II, a PPO-based policy network is trained to solve the problem of selecting prompts among eight different prompting techniques, such as Boundary Value Analysis, Random Fuzzing, etc., based on the inputted 11-dimensional state vector representing the source code complexity metrics and live coverage metrics to direct the LLM engine towards exploring unvisited paths in the program. The PPO agent receives rewards based on a combination of increases in line and branch coverages, penalties for unexplored branches, and rewards for reducing source code length. From experiments conducted on twenty benchmark programs, it is evident that the proposed approach, PPO-LLM, outperforms CBMC, kS-LLM, and kS-LLM++ in terms of branch and line coverage in almost all cases, for various loop bound values ranging from BOUND1 to BOUND2000. While at BOUND~1, the coverage of branches is 100% using PPO-LLM on the PALS suite, in comparison, it is around 86.8% using kS-LLM++. This confirms that adaptive prompt selection driven by PPO substantially outperforms static prompting strategies on PALS type programs.
HAVEN: Hybrid Automated Verification ENgine for UVM Testbench Synthesis with LLMs
Integrated Circuit (IC) verification consumes nearly 70% of the IC development cycle, and recent research leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate testbenches and reduce verification overhead. However, LLMs have difficulty generating testbenches correctly. Unlike high-level programming languages, Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are extremely rare in LLMs training data, leading LLMs to produce incorrect code. To overcome challenges when using LLMs to generate Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) testbenches and sequences, wepropose HAVEN (Hybrid Automated Verification ENgine) to prevent LLMs from writing HDL directly. For UVM testbench generation, HAVEN utilizes LLM agents to analyze design specifications to produce a structured architectural plan. The HAVEN Template Engine then combines with predefined and protocol-specific templates to generate all UVM components with correct bus-handshake timing. For UVM sequence generation, HAVEN introduces a Protocol-Aware Sequence Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that decomposes sequences into fine-grained step types. A set of predefined DSL patterns first establishes sequences that achieve a high coverage rate without LLM involvement. HAVEN continues to improve the coverage rate by iteratively leveraging LLM agents to analyze coverage gap reports and compose additional targeted DSL sequences. Unlike previous works, HAVEN is the first system that utilizes pre-defined, protocol-specific Jinja2 templates to generate all UVM components and UVM sequences using our proposed Protocol-Aware DSL and rule-based code generator. Our experimental results on 19 open-source IP designs spanning three interface protocols (Direct, Wishbone, AXI4-Lite) show that HAVEN achieves 100% compilation success, 90.6% code coverage, and 87.9% functional coverage on average, and is SOTA among LLM-assisted testbench generation systems.
RESTestBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating the Effectiveness of LLM-Generated REST API Test Cases from NL Requirements
Existing REST API testing tools are typically evaluated using code coverage and crash-based fault metrics. However, recent LLM-based approaches increasingly generate tests from NL requirements to validate functional behaviour, making traditional metrics weak proxies for whether generated tests validate intended behaviour. To address this gap, we present RESTestBench, a benchmark comprising three REST services paired with manually verified NL requirements in both precise and vague variants, enabling controlled and reproducible evaluation of requirement-based test generation. RESTestBench further introduces a requirements-based mutation testing metric that measures the fault-detection effectiveness of a generated test case with respect to a specific requirement, extending the property-based approach of Bartocci et al. . Using RESTestBench, we evaluate two approaches across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs: (i) non-refinement-based generation, and (ii) refinement-based generation guided by interaction with the running SUT. In the refinement experiments, RESTestBench assesses how exposure to the actual implementation, valid or mutated, affects test effectiveness. Our results show that test effectiveness drops considerably when the generator interacts with faulty or mutated code, especially for vague requirements, sometimes negating the benefit of refinement and indicating that incorporating actual SUT behaviour is unnecessary when requirement detail is high.
Where Did It Go Wrong? Capability-Oriented Failure Attribution for Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents
Embodied agents in safety-critical applications such as Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) rely on multiple interdependent capabilities (e.g., perception, memory, planning, decision), making failures difficult to localize and attribute. Existing testing methods are largely system-level and provide limited insight into which capability deficiencies cause task failures. We propose a capability-oriented testing approach that enables failure detection and attribution by combining (1) adaptive test case generation via seed selection and mutation, (2) capability oracles for identifying capability-specific errors, and (3) a feedback mechanism that attributes failures to capabilities and guides further test generation. Experiments show that our method discovers more failure cases and more accurately pinpoints capability-level deficiencies than state-of-the-art baselines, providing more interpretable and actionable guidance for improving embodied agents.
Ethics Testing: Proactive Identification of Generative AI System Harms
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) systems that can automatically generate content in the form of source code or other contents (e.g., images) has seen increasing popularity due to the emergence of tools such as ChatGPT which rely on Large Language Models (LLMs). Misuse of the automatically generated content can incur serious consequences due to potential harms in the generated content. Despite the importance of ensuring the quality of automatically generated content, there is little to no approach that can systematically generate tests for identifying software harms in the content generated by these GAI systems. In this article, we introduce the novel concept of ethics testing which aims to systematically generate tests for identifying software harms. Different from existing testing methodologies (e.g., fairness testing that aims to identifying software discrimination), ethics testing aims to systematically detect software harms that could be induced due to unethical behavior (e.g., harmful behavior or behavior that violates intellectual property rights) in automatically generated content. We introduced the concept of ethics testing, discussed the challenges therewithin, and conducted five case studies to show how ethics testing can be performed for generative AI systems.
Call-Chain-Aware LLM-Based Test Generation for Java Projects
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for generating project-level unit tests. However, existing state-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on execution-path information to guide prompt construction, which is often insufficient for complex software systems with rich inter-class dependencies, deep call chains, and intricate object initialization requirements. In this paper, we present CAT, a novel call-chain-aware LLM-based test generation approach that explicitly incorporates call-chain and dependency contexts into prompts through dedicated static analysis. To construct executable, semantically valid test contexts, CAT systematically models caller--callee relationships, object constructors, and third-party dependencies, and supports iterative test fixing when generation failures occur. We evaluate CAT on the widely used Defects4J benchmark and on four real-world GitHub projects released after the LLM's cut-off date. The results show that, across projects in Defects4J, CAT improves line and branch coverage by 18.04% and 21.74%, respectively, over the state-of-the-art approach PANTA, while consistently achieving superior performance on post-cutoff real-world projects. An ablation study further demonstrates the importance of call-chain and dependency contexts in CAT.
PrismaDV: Automated Task-Aware Data Unit Test Generation
Data is a central resource for modern enterprises, and data validation is essential for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. However, existing automated data unit testing frameworks are largely task-agnostic: they validate datasets without considering the semantics and requirements of the code that consumes the data. We present PrismaDV, a compound AI system that analyzes downstream task code together with dataset profiles to identify data access patterns, infer implicit data assumptions, and generate task-aware executable data unit tests. To further adapt the data unit tests over time to specific datasets and downstream tasks, we propose "Selective Informative Feedback for Task Adaptation" (SIFTA), a prompt-optimization framework that leverages the scarce outcomes from the execution of data unit tests and downstream tasks. We evaluate PrismaDV on two new benchmarks spanning 60 tasks across five datasets, where it consistently outperforms both task-agnostic and task-aware baselines in generating unit tests that reflect the end-to-end impact of data errors. Furthermore, we show that with SIFTA, we can automatically learn prompts for PrismaDV's modules that outperform prompts written by hand or generated from a generic prompt optimizer. We publicly release our benchmarks and prototype implementation.
You Don't Need Public Tests to Generate Correct Code
Multi-agent systems are frequently employed for autonomous code generation, demonstrating strong utility in complex algorithmic problem-solving. Recent studies tackle the difficulty of producing functionally correct programs by leveraging simulation-guided planning and debugging, wherein language models step through execution traces to validate logic. Nevertheless, these methods rely heavily on human-authored public test cases to anchor the simulation and debugging cycles. Hand-crafting exhaustive input-output pairs creates a significant, labor-intensive bottleneck within the software development lifecycle. Since ground-truth examples are seldom accessible before actual implementation in real-world scenarios, this reliance limits existing approaches primarily to curated competitive programming datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that depending on these public tests creates an "overconfidence gap," leading frameworks to overfit to basic examples and underperform on hidden test suites. Conversely, we note that external input samples are not an absolute requirement for successful code generation. We show that large language models possess the capability to autonomously construct valid inputs and simulate execution flows for self-correction. Building on this, we introduce DryRUN, a framework that removes the necessity for ground-truth data by enabling the LLM to iteratively plan, synthesize its own test inputs, and run simulated executions, thereby mitigating algorithmic overconfidence. Assessments using the LiveCodeBench v6 dataset (post-March 2025) reveal that DryRUN achieves comparable performance to CodeSIM, a state-of-the-art, test-dependent baseline. Notably, it does so entirely without public tests or external execution signals, all while decreasing overall output token usage.
From Particles to Perils: SVGD-Based Hazardous Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Systems Testing
Simulation-based testing of autonomous driving systems (ADS) must uncover realistic and diverse failures in dense, heterogeneous traffic. However, existing search-based seeding methods (e.g., genetic algorithms) struggle in high-dimensional spaces, often collapsing to limited modes and missing many failure scenarios. We present PtoP, a framework that combines adaptive random seed generation with Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to produce diverse, failure-inducing initial conditions. SVGD balances attraction toward high-risk regions and repulsion among particles, yielding risk-seeking yet well-distributed seeds across multiple failure modes. PtoP is plug-and-play and enhances existing online testing methods (e.g., reinforcement learning--based testers) by providing principled seeds. Evaluation in CARLA on two industry-grade ADS (Apollo, Autoware) and a native end-to-end system shows that PtoP improves safety violation rate (up to 27.68%), scenario diversity (9.6%), and map coverage (16.78%) over baselines.
Program Structure-aware Language Models: Targeted Software Testing beyond Textual Semantics
Recent advances in large language models for test case generation have improved branch coverage via prompt-engineered mutations. However, they still lack principled mechanisms for steering models toward specific high-risk execution branches, limiting their effectiveness for discovering subtle bugs and security vulnerabilities. We propose GLMTest, the first program structure-aware LLM framework for targeted test case generation that seamlessly integrates code property graphs and code semantics using a graph neural network and a language model to condition test case generation on execution branches. This structured conditioning enables controllable and branch-targeted test case generation, thereby potentially enhancing bug and security risk discovery. Experiments on real-world projects show that GLMTest built on a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model improves branch accuracy from 27.4% to 50.2% on TestGenEval benchmark compared with state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and GPT-4o-mini.
ACE: Self-Evolving LLM Coding Framework via Adversarial Unit Test Generation and Preference Optimization
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation but remain heavily reliant on large-scale annotated solutions and verification-based supervision, which constrains scalability and hinders sustained self-improvement. Recent solver--verifier frameworks exploit program execution as an automatic supervision signal, but their effectiveness degrades as solvers become moderately strong: verifier-generated tests increasingly confirm semantic correctness rather than exposing the remaining failure modes. We propose \textbf{ACE}, a self-evolving code generation framework based on a solver--adversary architecture that prioritizes active failure discovery through execution-centric supervision. A single LLM alternates between generating candidate programs and producing adversarial unit test inputs optimized to induce execution-level failures, such as runtime errors, exceptions, or non-termination. Supervision is derived solely from execution outcomes: robust programs are selected for supervised fine-tuning, while adversarial tests are optimized via Kahneman--Tversky Optimization using execution-derived preferences. Notably, the entire training loop requires no ground-truth code or external reward models. Experiments on CodeContests, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench demonstrate that ACE consistently outperforms strong solver--verifier baselines, achieving 3--7% absolute gains in pass@1, with larger improvements on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while maintaining competitive or improved inference efficiency.
AnyPoC: Universal Proof-of-Concept Test Generation for Scalable LLM-Based Bug Detection
While recent LLM-based agents can identify many candidate bugs in source code, their reports remain static hypotheses that require manual validation, limiting the practicality of automated bug detection. We frame this challenge as a test generation task: given a candidate report, synthesizing an executable proof-of-concept (PoC) - such as a script, command sequence, or crafted input - to trigger the suspected defect. Automated PoC generation can act as a scalable validation oracle, enabling end-to-end autonomous bug detection by providing concrete execution evidence. However, naive LLM agents are unreliable validators: they are biased toward "success" and may reward-hack by producing plausible but non-functional PoCs or even hallucinated traces. To address this, we present ANYPoC, a general multi-agent framework that (1) analyzes and fact-checks a candidate bug report, (2) iteratively synthesizes and executes a PoC while collecting execution traces, and (3) independently re-executes and scrutinizes the PoC to mitigate hallucination and reward hacking. In addition, ANYPoC also continuously extracts and evolves a PoC knowledge base to handle heterogeneous tasks. ANYPoC operates on candidate bug reports regardless of their source and can be paired with different bug reporters. To demonstrate practicality and generality, we apply ANYPoC, together with a simple agentic bug reporter, on 12 large-scale, critical software systems, including Firefox, Chromium, LLVM, OpenSSL, SQLite, FFmpeg, and Redis. Compared to the state-of-the-art coding agents, e.g., Claude Code and Codex, ANYPoC produces 37% more valid PoCs for true-positive bug reports and rejects 9.7x more false-positive bug reports. ANYPoC also enables the discovery of 121 new bugs from over two thousand noisy bug reports, with 108 confirmed by developers and 92 fixed. 46 PoCs have also been adopted as official regression tests.
HyperNet-Adaptation for Diffusion-Based Test Case Generation
The increasing deployment of deep learning systems requires systematic evaluation of their reliability in real-world scenarios. Traditional gradient-based adversarial attacks introduce small perturbations that rarely correspond to realistic failures and mainly assess robustness rather than functional behavior. Generative test generation methods offer an alternative but are often limited to simple datasets or constrained input domains. Although diffusion models enable high-fidelity image synthesis, their computational cost and limited controllability restrict their applicability to large-scale testing. We present HyNeA, a generative testing method that enables direct and efficient control over diffusion-based generation. HyNeA provides dataset-free controllability through hypernetworks, allowing targeted manipulation of the generative process without relying on architecture-specific conditioning mechanisms or dataset-driven adaptations such as fine-tuning. HyNeA employs a distinct training strategy that supports instance-level tuning to identify failure-inducing test cases without requiring datasets that explicitly contain examples of similar failures. This approach enables the targeted generation of realistic failure cases at substantially lower computational cost than search-based methods. Experimental results show that HyNeA improves controllability and test diversity compared to existing generative test generators and generalizes to domains where failure-labeled training data is unavailable.
SWE-Tester: Training Open-Source LLMs for Issue Reproduction in Real-World Repositories
Software testing is crucial for ensuring the correctness and reliability of software systems. Automated generation of issue reproduction tests from natural language issue descriptions enhances developer productivity by simplifying root cause analysis, promotes test-driven development -- "test first, write code later", and can be used for improving the effectiveness of automated issue resolution systems like coding agents. Existing methods proposed for this task predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs, with limited exploration of open models. To address this, we propose SWE-Tester -- a novel pipeline for training open-source LLMs to generate issue reproduction tests. First, we curate a high-quality training dataset of 41K instances from 2.6K open-source GitHub repositories and use it to train LLMs of varying sizes and families. The fine-tuned models achieve absolute improvements of up to 10% in success rate and 21% in change coverage on SWT-Bench Verified. Further analysis shows consistent improvements with increased inference-time compute, more data, and larger models. These results highlight the effectiveness of our framework for advancing open-source LLMs in this domain.
MASTEST: A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System For Testing RESTful APIs
Testing RESTful API is increasingly complicated but indispensable to quality assurance of cloud-native applications. This paper reports a multi-agent system called MASTEST that combines LLM-based intelligent agents and programmed agents to automate REST API testing. They form a complete tool chain covering the whole workflow of REST API test with API specification in the OpenAPI Swagger format as the input. It also incorporates human testers in the process to review and correct LLM generated test artefacts to control the quality of testing activities. MASTEST is evaluated on two LLMs, GPT-4o and DeepSeek V3.1 Reasoner with five public APIs. Its performances on various testing activities are measured by a wide range of metrics, including adequacy and coverage metrics, the syntax and data type correctness of generated test scripts, the usability of LLM generated test cases and scripts, as well as the bug detection ability. Experiment results demonstrated that both DeepSeek and GPT-4o achieved a high overall performance but had strengths and weaknesses on different testing activities. MASTEST generated test cases achieved 94% and 98% unit test coverage and 79% and 78% system test coverage for GPT-4o and DeepSeek respectively in comparison with human designed test cases. The generated test scripts maintained 100% syntax correctness and only required minimal manual edits for semantic correctness. The generated test scripts contain assertions on the expected status code as well as contents in the response messages. They are highly capable of detecting bugs in the REST APIs. Experiment data shows that the bug detection rates are between 2.13 to 4.50 per operation. These findings indicate that MASTEST is highly efficient and effective.
Simulator Ensembles for Trustworthy Autonomous Driving Systems Testing
Scenario-based testing with driving simulators is extensively used to identify failing conditions of automated driving assistance systems (ADAS). However, existing studies have shown that repeated test execution in the same as well as in distinct simulators can yield different outcomes, which can be attributed to sources of flakiness or different implementations of the physics. In this paper, we present MultiSim, a novel approach to multi-simulation ADAS testing based on a search-based testing approach that leverages an ensemble of simulators to identify failure-inducing, simulator-agnostic test scenarios. During the search, each scenario is evaluated jointly on multiple simulators. Scenarios that produce consistent results across simulators are prioritized for further exploration, while those that fail on only a subset of simulators are given less priority, as they may reflect simulator-specific issues rather than generalizable failures. Our empirical study, which involves testing three lane-keeping ADAS on different pairs of three widely used simulators, demonstrates that MultiSim outperforms single-simulator testing by achieving, on average, a higher rate of simulator-agnostic failures by 66%. Compared to a state-of-the-art multi-simulator approach that combines the outcome of independent test generation campaigns obtained in different simulators, MultiSim identifies, on average, up to 3.4X more simulator-agnostic failing tests and higher failure rates. To avoid the costly execution of test inputs on which simulators disagree, we propose to predict simulator disagreements and bypass test executions. Our results show that utilizing a surrogate model during the search retains the average number of valid failures and also improves efficiency. Our findings indicate that combining an ensemble of simulators is a promising approach for the automated cross-replication in ADAS testing.
Evaluating LLM-Based Regression Test Generation
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tremendous promise in automated software engineering. In this paper, we investigate LLMs for just-in-time regression test generation for programs, like parsers, interpreters, or compilers, that take highly structured, human-readable inputs. When a bug fix or code change is committed, the repository (as part of CI/CD) runs an LLM for a few minutes to generate regression tests that exercise the changed code and potentially trigger bugs. We frame LLM-based regression test generation as a machine translation task that takes the developer-provided commit message, the code change, and the input format name (e.g., XML), and produces regression tests for the described change in that format. Testing 72 commits to Mujs, Libxml2, Poppler, JerryScript, Z3, PHP, JQ, and MicroPython, our feedback-directed, zero-shot prototype Cleverest performed well, even without the code change. In under 2 minutes on average, Cleverest found as many bugs as the state-of-the-art directed greybox fuzzer WAFLGo did in 24 hours, even though WAFLGo started with a commit-reaching seed corpus in most cases. Using the Cleverest-generated tests as a seed corpus in coverage-guided greybox fuzzing doubles the number of bugs found; we call this integration ClevFuzz. We also find that some commit messages are more expressive than others, thus we ask how it impacts Cleverest's effectiveness. Cleverest picks up on the change intention: e.g., given a commit message that a patch changes how floating point variables are treated in the Mujs JavaScript interpreter, Cleverest generates JavaScript programs that contain floating point variables. Minimally changing commit messages to reduce or increase their information substantially impacts effectiveness: adding 17 words on average (max. 43) to make ineffective commit messages more expressive significantly increased the number of bugs found.
Automatic Item Generation for Personality Situational Judgment Tests with Large Language Models
Personality assessment through situational judgment tests (SJTs) offers unique advantages over traditional Likert-type self-report scales, yet their development remains labor-intensive, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on subject matter experts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automatic item generation (AIG). Building on these developments, the present study focuses on developing and evaluating a structured and generalizable framework for automatically generating personality SJTs, using GPT-4 and ChatGPT-5 as empirical examples. Three studies were conducted. Study 1 systematically compared the effects of prompt design and temperature settings on the content validity of LLM-generated items to develop an effective and stable LLM-based AIG approach for personality SJT. Results showed that optimized prompts and a temperature of 1.0 achieved the best balance of creativity and accuracy on GPT-4. Study 2 examined the cross-model generalizability and reproducibility of this automated SJT generation approach through multiple rounds. The results showed that the approach consistently produced reproducible and high-quality items on ChatGPT-5. Study 3 evaluated the psychometric properties of LLM-generated SJTs covering five facets of the Big Five personality traits. Results demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity across most facets, though limitations were observed in the convergent validity of the compliance facet and certain aspects of criterion-related validity. These findings provide robust evidence that the proposed LLM-based AIG approach can produce culturally appropriate and psychometrically sound SJTs with efficiency comparable to or exceeding traditional methods.
Requirement-Based Testing: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Game Theory
We consider the automatic online synthesis of black-box test cases from functional requirements specified as automata for reactive implementations. The goal of the tester is to reach some given state, so as to satisfy a coverage criterion, while monitoring the violation of the requirements. We develop an approach based on Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is a classical technique in reinforcement learning for efficiently selecting promising inputs. Seeing the automata requirements as a game between the implementation and the tester, we develop a heuristic by biasing the search towards inputs that are promising in this game. We experimentally show that our heuristic accelerates the convergence of the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm, thus improving the performance of testing.
FaultLens: Learning Compact Behavioral Test Suites for Generated Operational Programs
Generated operational programs are often validated with either a few hand-written examples or exhaustive regression suites. The former can miss sparse boundary and interaction faults, while the latter can be unnecessarily expensive. We introduce FaultLens, a method for learning compact behavioral test suites while preserving an auditable connection to executed evidence. It executes a rich probe domain once, stores the fault-probe kill relation as a sparse outcome cache, and learns probe orderings only from earlier program generations. A fault-driven greedy component exploits known kill structure, while a mutation-independent diversity component covers probe families, cases, templates, and temporal bins. Their alternating hybrid remains useful when a new program contains a fault mechanism absent from ordering construction. We evaluate twenty generated operational policies across four environments, ten execution seeds, 1,200 measured run summaries, 2,160 controlled program transformations, and 4,120,200 executed program-probe pairs. Of 1,960 intended faulty transformations, 1,779 alter a contract or output somewhere in the finite audit domain; 200 additional controls preserve behavior. A 32-probe hybrid learned on generations 1-3 covers 576/582 (99.0%) dynamically killable faults in generations 4-5 using 1.2-2.0% of the exhaustive domain. With an entire fault family withheld from training, diversity raises scenario-family macro coverage from 84.6% to 94.9%. In a downstream deployment study, a conservative admission rule reduces severe tail regressions from 15/20 program-environment groups to 0/20. FaultLens provides a prioritized evidence mechanism, not a proof of correctness, and makes its budget, evidence source, generalization split, and misses explicit.