artificial intelligence

VeriSkill: A Self-Evolution Framework for Program Verification Skills

arXiv:2607.27733

summary

The paper introduces VeriSkill, a framework that lets large language model agents automatically improve their program verification abilities by identifying skill gaps, extracting diagnostic lessons, and iteratively refining verification skills while preserving program semantics.

Abstract

Automating program verification with LLM agents requires generating specifications, annotations, auxiliary lemmas, and tool invocations, all of which depend on reusable skills. A natural remedy is skill self-evolution: distilling skills from trajectories and refining them through feedback. However, existing evolution methods struggle with program verification tasks because they cannot reliably identify skill-specific failures or extract actionable signals from opaque verifier feedback. In this paper, we propose VeriSkill, a self-evolution framework built for program verification. It attributes verification failures to skill deficiencies, distills diagnostic signatures into reusable lessons, and iteratively refines candidate skills, admitting only revisions that improve verification performance while preserving program semantics. Experiments show that VeriSkill consistently outperforms all baselines across multiple verification tools, agent frameworks, and LLM backends.

Topics & keywords

#program verification#large language models#skill self-evolution#automated reasoning#software verificationLLM agentsspecification generationverification feedbackskill distillationsemantic preservation
VeriSkill: A Self-Evolution Framework for Program Verification Skills · wovepaper