Modelling Concurrency Bugs Using Machine Learning
Teodor Rares Begu
Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of traction in the recent years,
with machine learning notably starting to see more applications across a varied
range of fields. One specific machine learning application that is of interest
to us is that of software safety and security, especially in the context of
parallel programs. The issue of being able to detect concurrency bugs
automatically has intrigued programmers for a long time, as the added layer of
complexity makes concurrent programs more prone to failure. The development of
such automatic detection tools provides considerable benefits to programmers in
terms of saving time while debugging, as well as reducing the number of
unexpected bugs. We believe machine learning may help achieve this goal by
providing additional advantages over current approaches, in terms of both
overall tool accuracy as well as programming language flexibility. However, due
to the presence of numerous challenges specific to the machine learning
approach (correctly labelling a sufficiently large dataset, finding the best
model types/architectures and so forth), we have to approach each issue of
developing such a tool separately. Therefore, the focus of this project is on
comparing both common and recent machine learning approaches. We abstract away
the complexity of procuring a labelled dataset of concurrent programs under the
form of a synthetic dataset that we define and generate with the scope of
simulating real-life (concurrent) programs. We formulate hypotheses about
fundamental limits of various machine learning model types which we then
validate by running extensive tests on our synthetic dataset. We hope that our
findings provide more insight in the advantages and disadvantages of various
model types when modelling programs using machine learning, as well as any
other related field (e.g. NLP).