Mon 15 Jun 2026 10:40 - 11:00 at Meadows B - PAgE Session 1 Chair(s): Shraddha Barke

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 Jun

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10:40 - 12:20
PAgE Session 1PAgE at Meadows B
Chair(s): Shraddha Barke Microsoft Research, Redmond
10:40
20m
Talk
Agentic Code Reasoning
PAgE
Shubham Ugare Meta, Satish Chandra Meta Platforms, Inc.
Pre-print
11:00
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
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
20m
Talk
The Next Frontier for AI-Generated Kernels: Correctness
PAgE
Guido Martínez Microsoft Research, Tyler Sorensen University of California at Santa Cruz
DOI Pre-print
12:00
20m
Talk
Testing LLM-Generated Distributed Protocol Code
PAgE
Ankush Das Boston University, Brendan Coyne Boston University