Local Success Does Not Compose: Benchmarking Large Language Models for
  Compositional Formal Verification
Authors: name: Xu Xu; name: Xin Li; name: Xingwei Qu; name: Jie Fu; name: Binhang Yuan
Published: 2025-09-27 02:33:08

Abstract: We introduce DafnyCOMP, a benchmark for evaluating large language models
(LLMs) on compositional specification generation in Dafny. Unlike prior
benchmarks that focus on single-function tasks, DafnyCOMP targets programs
composed of multiple interacting functions with data dependencies, requiring
reasoning across component boundaries. The benchmark consists of 300
automatically synthesized multi-function programs. We evaluate several
state-of-the-art LLM families and find that, while they perform well on
single-function verification, their performance drops sharply on compositional
tasks. Analysis reveals systematic failures in cross-functional reasoning,
including fragile specifications, misalignment between implementations and
proofs, and unstable reasoning. DafnyCOMP thus provides a diagnostic tool for
measuring progress toward reliable, verifiable, and compositional code
generation with LLMs.