Fidelity Probes for Specification--Code Alignment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17246v1
• Date: Sun, 17 May 2026 04:05:54 GMT
• Title: Fidelity Probes for Specification--Code Alignment
• Abstract summary: We introduce fidelity probes: natural-dependence questions generated from a reference artifact with code-derived ground-truth answers.<n>The fidelity probes decompose into contradiction and coverage-gap rates that drive targeted spec edits to convergence.<n>On a 15-program, roughly 12k-line benchmark, we raise frozen-test specification fidelity from 0.63 to 0.94 over eight iterations.
• Score: 7.754687669049819
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We introduce fidelity probes: natural-language questions generated from a reference artifact with code-derived ground-truth answers, answered from a candidate specification. The fraction of agreeing probes, which we call the fidelity, decomposes into contradiction and coverage-gap rates that drive targeted spec edits to convergence. On a 15-program, roughly 12k-line COBOL benchmark (AWS CardDemo), we raise frozen-test specification fidelity from 0.63 to 0.94 over eight iterations, with the plateau location predicted by a two-state Markov fixed point $F^\dagger$ from just four iterations of rate data. Probes come from an LLM reading the code or from a static-analysis pipeline over its control-flow, data-flow, and system-dependence graphs, with a tunable mixture. A probe-resampling protocol with a frozen held-out set gives a Hoeffding-bounded overfitting discriminant; our measured train/test gap stays more than an order of magnitude below this envelope. Three graph-grounded mixtures lift fidelity by +16 to +30 points; cross-distribution evaluation shows the LLM and symbolic channels are empirically complementary. A cross-family generator sweep on five independent LLM lineages (Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Alibaba, OpenAI) confirms the convergence behaviour is not tied to any single model family: three of five non-Claude generators produce trajectories consistent with the Markov fixed-point prediction, and the frozen-test protocol actively falsifies the two generators whose probe distributions drift across iterations. The method applies to any pair of artifacts that are supposed to describe the same behaviour.

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