SimP: Unifying Syntax- and Semantic-Guided Techniques for Efficient Program Reduction

2026-08-08

AI Summary

Compiler testing often involves large-scale programs, which significantly hinders the efficiency of bug reproduction and debugging. To address this challenge, this work proposes SimP, a novel framework that introduces large language models (LLMs) into program reduction for the first time. SimP synergistically combines rule-based syntactic pruning with LLM-driven semantic guidance, employing customized prompts to enable multi-stage collaborative optimization. The approach achieves substantially improved reduction efficiency while maintaining comparable reduction quality to existing methods. Notably, the computational overhead and economic cost associated with LLM invocations are negligible, making SimP both high-performing and practical for real-world compiler testing scenarios.

Abstract

Compiler bugs are pervasive in modern compiler systems, but the test programs that trigger them are often too large for practical debugging. Program reduction addresses this by minimizing test program size while preserving the original bug-triggering behavior. Existing approaches mainly rely on syntax-guided, rule-based deletion strategies that iteratively remove parts of the program in a trial-and-error manner. While effective in reduction quality, these approaches suffer from slow reduction speed. This paper presents SimP, a program reduction framework that combines traditional reduction with LLM-based syntax- and semantic-guided reduction. SimP leverages customized prompt design to guide the reduction process. SimP synergistically combines rule-based and LLM-based reduction stages to optimize the reduction performance. The results show that SimP improves reduction efficiency while achieving comparable reduction quality, with negligible LLM monetary cost.

Problem

• compiler bugs
• program reduction
• debugging
• reduction efficiency
• test programs

Innovation

• program reduction
• LLM-guided reduction
• syntax-guided
• semantic-guided
• compiler debugging