Verified but Vacuous: Three Failure Surfaces of LLM-Driven Verified Code Generation

Authors: Aditya Vempaty , Himaneesh Sompalle , Manan Tayal , Mowafak Allaham , Prasenjit Dey , Ashish Jagmohan , Ravi Kokku

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Abstract: What should ``verified'' mean when evaluating LLM-generated code? Many existing pipelines report a single verification number. We argue this collapses three distinct properties measured in a conditional audit sequence: verifier acceptance (Surface A), \emph{syntactic specification binding (Surface B: does the proof obligation bind to the spec?), and \emph{semantic specification fidelity} (Surface C: does the spec capture the informal requirement?). Two empirical demonstrations show the surfaces separate. \textbf{First ($A \neq B$), via Li@Opus (a same-model reproduction of \citet{li2025dafny}'s Dafny-as-intermediate-representation (IR) pipeline under Claude Opus 4.7) on three Python benchmarks}: it reaches \textbf{99.1\% verifier acceptance} on HumanEval while only \textbf{1.9\%} carry a certificate binding to a spec-defined predicate or function. \textbf{Second ($B \neq C$), via VCG on two Rust benchmarks}: we use VCG (which is our own in-house Dafny-as-intermediate pipeline) on Rust because the Rust target lets us enforce fully-verifiable output (every component ships as a Dafny certificate, ensures-binding gate passing by construction). Even inside that construction, \textbf{11.48\% (MBPP-Rust) and 14.82\% (VeriContest LC slice) of structurally-verified samples still fail hidden tests}. On the LC slice of VeriContest, \textbf{VCG's reported End2End rate is 7.79\% (535/6870).} The cited external rates are 5.51\% (GPT-5.5) and 1.88\% (single-shot Opus 4.7). These give descriptive differences of 2.3 percentage points and 4.14$\times$, respectively; task-budget, repair and harness differences prevent a matched-performance claim.

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Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

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arXiv:2611.05590 [cs.AI]

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arXiv:2611.05590v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05590

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From: Aditya Vempaty [ view email ]

[v1]

Tue, 3 Nov 2026 20:20:57 UTC (164 KB)

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