HoarePrompt: Structural Reasoning About Program Correctness in Natural Language

While software requirements are often expressed in natural language, verifying the correctness of a program against natural language requirements is a hard and underexplored problem. Large language models (LLMs) are promising candidates for addressing this challenge, however our experience shows that they are ineffective in this task, often failing to detect even straightforward bugs. To address this gap, we introduce HoarePrompt, a novel approach that adapts fundamental ideas from program analysis and verification to natural language artifacts. Drawing inspiration from the strongest postcondition calculus, HoarePrompt employs a systematic, step-by-step process in which an LLM generates natural language descriptions of reachable program states at various points in the code. To manage loops, we propose few-shot-driven k-induction, an adaptation of the k-induction method widely used in model checking. Once program states are described, HoarePrompt leverages the LLM to assess whether the program, annotated with these state descriptions, conforms to the natural language requirements. For evaluating the quality of classifiers of program correctness with respect to natural language requirements, we constructed CoCoClaNeL, a challenging dataset of solutions to programming competition problems. Our experiments show that HoarePrompt improves the MCC by 62% compared to directly using Zero-shot-CoT prompts for correctness classification. Furthermore, HoarePrompt outperforms a classifier that assesses correctness via LLM-based test generation by increasing the MCC by 93%. The inductive reasoning mechanism contributes a 28% boost to MCC, underscoring its effectiveness in managing loops.