Correctness-Guaranteed Code Generation via Constrained Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Li, Lingxiao, Rahili, Salar, Zhao, Yiwei
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909748596572160
author Li, Lingxiao
Rahili, Salar
Zhao, Yiwei
author_facet Li, Lingxiao
Rahili, Salar
Zhao, Yiwei
contents Language Models (LMs) are increasingly being used for code generation, but ensuring the correctness of generated programs remains a significant challenge. Although imperfect code may be acceptable during software development with human oversight, domains such as video games and robotics require one-shot correctness for runtime-critical components. We present a constrained decoding algorithm for generating semantically correct programs that incorporates a context-sensitive parser, which, at each step, outputs a regular expression that satisfies a critical non-extensible property to guide the generation of the next token sequence that can continue to a correct program. To build such a context-sensitive parser, we propose a framework of a dynamic tree of parsers (ToP) during parsing, where each parser corresponds to a modular context-free grammar enriched with contextual information such as variable scopes and type constraints, with tree branches representing ambiguity in the future code segment. We demonstrate our approach through sLua, a strongly typed variant of Lua, showing that our method can generate semantically correct programs conforming to any prescribed scripting API. We further show that, with careful design, our semantic guarantees extend to runtime correctness, as validated in the application of generating game mechanics for a roguelike video game.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15866
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Correctness-Guaranteed Code Generation via Constrained Decoding
Li, Lingxiao
Rahili, Salar
Zhao, Yiwei
Programming Languages
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
Language Models (LMs) are increasingly being used for code generation, but ensuring the correctness of generated programs remains a significant challenge. Although imperfect code may be acceptable during software development with human oversight, domains such as video games and robotics require one-shot correctness for runtime-critical components. We present a constrained decoding algorithm for generating semantically correct programs that incorporates a context-sensitive parser, which, at each step, outputs a regular expression that satisfies a critical non-extensible property to guide the generation of the next token sequence that can continue to a correct program. To build such a context-sensitive parser, we propose a framework of a dynamic tree of parsers (ToP) during parsing, where each parser corresponds to a modular context-free grammar enriched with contextual information such as variable scopes and type constraints, with tree branches representing ambiguity in the future code segment. We demonstrate our approach through sLua, a strongly typed variant of Lua, showing that our method can generate semantically correct programs conforming to any prescribed scripting API. We further show that, with careful design, our semantic guarantees extend to runtime correctness, as validated in the application of generating game mechanics for a roguelike video game.
title Correctness-Guaranteed Code Generation via Constrained Decoding
topic Programming Languages
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15866