Paper
From Verification to Herding: Exploiting Software's Sparsity of Influence
Authors
Tim Menzies, Kishan Kumar Ganguly
Abstract
Software verification is now costly, taking over half the project effort while failing on modern complex systems. We hence propose a shift from verification and modeling to herding: treating testing as a model-free search task that steers systems toward target goals. This exploits the "Sparsity of Influence" -the fact that, often, large software state spaces are ruled by just a few variables, We introduce EZR (Efficient Zero-knowledge Ranker), a stochastic learner that finds these controllers directly. Across dozens of tasks, EZR achieved 90% of peak results with only 32 samples, replacing heavy solvers with light sampling.
Metadata
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Raw Data (Debug)
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"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10478v1</id>\n <title>From Verification to Herding: Exploiting Software's Sparsity of Influence</title>\n <updated>2026-03-11T07:05:29Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10478v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10478v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Software verification is now costly, taking over half the project effort while failing on modern complex systems. We hence propose a shift from verification and modeling to herding: treating testing as a model-free search task that steers systems toward target goals. This exploits the \"Sparsity of Influence\" -the fact that, often, large software state spaces are ruled by just a few variables, We introduce EZR (Efficient Zero-knowledge Ranker), a stochastic learner that finds these controllers directly. Across dozens of tasks, EZR achieved 90% of peak results with only 32 samples, replacing heavy solvers with light sampling.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.SE'/>\n <published>2026-03-11T07:05:29Z</published>\n <arxiv:comment>to be published in VERIFAI-2026 workshop</arxiv:comment>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.SE'/>\n <author>\n <name>Tim Menzies</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Kishan Kumar Ganguly</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}