This program is tentative and subject to change.

Thu 18 Jun 2026 10:30 - 10:50 at Flatirons 4 - Generative Testing and Program Synthesis

Crash consistency is essential for applications that must persist data. Crash-consistency testing has been commonly applied to find crash-consistency bugs in applications. The crash-state space grows exponentially as the number of operations in the program increases, necessitating techniques for pruning the search space. However, state-of-the-art crash-state space pruning is far from ideal. Some techniques look for known buggy patterns or bound the exploration for efficiency, but they sacrifice coverage and may miss bugs lodged deep within applications. Other techniques eliminate redundancy in the search space by skipping identical crash states, but they still fail to scale to larger applications. In this work, we propose representative testing: a new crash-state space reduction strategy that achieves high scalability and high coverage. Our key observation is that the consistency of crash states is often correlated, even if those crash states are not identical. We build Pathfinder, a crash-consistency testing tool that implements an update behaviors-based heuristic to approximate a small set of representative crash states. We evaluate Pathfinder on POSIX-based and MMIO-based applications, where it finds 18 (7 new) bugs across 8 production-ready systems. Pathfinder scales more effectively to large applications than prior works and finds 4x more bugs in POSIX-based applications and 8x more bugs in MMIO-based applications compared to state-of-the-art systems.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Thu 18 Jun

Displayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change

10:30 - 12:10
Generative Testing and Program SynthesisPLDI Research Papers at Flatirons 4
10:30
20m
Talk
[SIGPLAN] Scalable and Accurate Application-Level Crash-Consistency Testing via Representative Testing
PLDI Research Papers
Yile Gu University of Washington, Ian Neal University of Michigan and Veridise, Jiexiao Xu University of Washington, Shaun Christopher Lee University of Washington, Ayman Said University of Michigan, Musa Haydar University of Michigan, Jacob Van Geffen , Andrew Quinn University of California at Santa Cruz, Baris Kasikci University of Washington
10:50
20m
Talk
Trace-Guided Synthesis of Effectful Test Generators
PLDI Research Papers
Zhe Zhou Purdue University, Ankush Desai Snowflake, Benjamin Delaware Purdue University, Suresh Jagannathan Purdue University
DOI
11:10
20m
Talk
Semantic Reification: A New Paradigm for Random Program Generation
PLDI Research Papers
Kavya Chopra ETH Zurich, Cong Li ETH Zurich, Thodoris Sotiropoulos ETH Zurich, Zhendong Su ETH Zurich
DOI
11:30
20m
Talk
Enumerating Ill-Typed Programs for Testing Type Analyzers
PLDI Research Papers
Thodoris Sotiropoulos ETH Zurich, Zhendong Su ETH Zurich
DOI
11:50
20m
Talk
The Search for Constrained Random Generators
PLDI Research Papers
Harrison Goldstein SUNY Buffalo, Hila Peleg Technion, Cassia Torczon University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Sainati University of Pennsylvania, Leonidas Lampropoulos University of Maryland at College Park, Benjamin C. Pierce University of Pennsylvania
DOI