SLICET5: Static Program Slicing using Language Models with Copy Mechanism and Constrained Decoding

Abstract: Static program slicing is a fundamental technique in software engineering. Traditional static slicing tools rely on parsing complete source code, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios where code snippets are incomplete or unparsable. While recent research developed learning-based approaches to predict slices, they face critical challenges: (1) Inaccurate dependency identification, where models fail to precisely capture data and control dependencies between code elements; and (2) Unconstrained generation, where models produce slices with extraneous or hallucinated tokens not present in the input, violating the structural integrity of slices. To address these challenges, we propose \ourtool, a novel slicing framework that reformulates static program slicing as a sequence-to-sequence task using lightweight LLMs (e.g., CodeT5+). Our approach incorporates two key innovations. First, we introduce a copy mechanism that enables the model to more accurately capture inter-element dependencies and directly copy relevant tokens from the input, improving both dependency reasoning and generation constraint. Second, we design a constrained decoding process with (a) lexical constraint, restricting outputs to input tokens only, and (b) syntactic constraint, leveraging Tree Similarity of Edit Distance (TSED) monotonicity to detect structurally invalid outputs and discard them. We evaluate \ourtool on CodeNet and LeetCode datasets and show it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving ExactMatch scores by up to 27\%. Furthermore, \ourtool demonstrates strong performance on incomplete code, highlighting its robustness and practical utility in real-world development environments.