Tasks People Prompt: A Taxonomy of LLM Downstream Tasks in Software Verification and Falsification Approaches

Abstract: Prompting has become one of the main approaches to leverage emergent capabilities of LLMs [Brown et al. NeurIPS 2020, Wei et al. TMLR 2022, Wei et al. NeurIPS 2022]. Recently, researchers and practitioners have been "playing" with prompts (e.g., In-Context Learning) to see how to make the most of pre-trained LLMs. By homogeneously dissecting more than a hundred articles, we investigate how software testing and verification research communities have leveraged LLMs capabilities. First, we validate that downstream tasks are adequate to convey a nontrivial modular blueprint of prompt-based proposals in scope. Moreover, we name and classify the concrete downstream tasks we recover in both validation research papers and solution proposals. In order to perform classification, mapping, and analysis, we also develop a novel downstream-task taxonomy. The main taxonomy requirement is to highlight commonalities while exhibiting variation points of task types that enable pinpointing emerging patterns in a varied spectrum of Software Engineering problems that encompasses testing, fuzzing, fault localization, vulnerability detection, static analysis, and program verification approaches. Avenues for future research are also discussed based on conceptual clusters induced by the taxonomy.