Survey on Learning-Based Formal Methods: Taxonomy, Applications and Possible Future Directions

Abstract

Formal methods play an important role in testing and verifying software quality, especially in modern society with rapid technological updates. Learning-based techniques have been extensively applied to learn (a model or model-free) for formal verification and to learn system specifications, and resulted in numerous contributions. Due to the fact that adequate system models are often difficult to design manually and manual definition of specifications for such software systems gets infeasible, which motivate new research directions in learning models and/or specifications from observed system behaviors automatically. This paper mainly concentrates on learning-based techniques in formal methods area. An up-to-date overview of the current state-of-the-art in learning-based formal methods is provided in the paper. This paper is not a comprehensive survey of learning-based techniques in formal methods area, but rather as a survey of the taxonomy, applications and possible future directions in learning-based formal methods.