Can LLM agents explore codebases and reason about code semantics without executing the code? We study this capability, which we call agentic code reasoning, and introduce semi-formal reasoning: a structured prompting methodology that requires agents to construct explicit premises, trace execution paths, and derive formal conclusions. Unlike unstructured chain-of-thought, semi-formal reasoning acts as a certificate: the agent cannot skip cases or make unsupported claims. We evaluate across three tasks (patch equivalence verification, fault localization, and code question answering) and show that semi-formal reasoning consistently improves accuracy on all of them. For patch equivalence, accuracy improves from 78% to 88% on curated examples and reaches 93% on real-world agent-generated patches, approaching the reliability needed for execution-free RL reward signals. For code question answering on RubberDuckBench Mohammad et al. (2026), semi-formal reasoning achieves 87% accuracy, a 9 percentage point gain over standard agentic reasoning. For fault localization on Defects4J Just et al. (2014), semi-formal reasoning improves Top-5 accuracy by 5 percentage points over standard reasoning. These results demonstrate that structured agentic reasoning enables meaningful semantic code analysis without execution, opening practical applications in RL training pipelines, code review, and static program analysis.
Mon 15 JunDisplayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change
10:40 - 12:20 | |||
10:40 20mTalk | Agentic Code Reasoning PAgE Pre-print | ||
11:00 20mTalk | Towards Verified Code Reasoning by LLMs PAgE Meghana Aparna Sistla Google DeepMind, Gogul Balakrishnan Google, Patrick Rondon Google, José Pablo Cambronero Google, USA, Michele Tufano Google, Satish Chandra Meta Platforms, Inc. | ||
11:20 20mTalk | Testing, Credible Compilation, and Verification in the Axon Verified Compiler in Lean and Claude CodeRemote PAgE Martin C. Rinard Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
11:40 20mTalk | The Next Frontier for AI-Generated Kernels: Correctness PAgE DOI Pre-print | ||
12:00 20mTalk | Testing LLM-Generated Distributed Protocol Code PAgE | ||