Citing This Book and Perses

This page collects citation information for the book, Perses, and the Perses-family papers discussed throughout the text.

Citing This Book

Cite the online book as:

@book{tian2026programreduction101,
  author = {Yongqiang Tian},
  title = {Program Reduction 101: From Delta Debugging to Perses and Syntax-Guided Reducers},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/yqtian-se/program-reduction-101}
}

Citing Perses

The original Perses paper is:

@inproceedings{perses,
  author = {Sun, Chengnian and Li, Yuanbo and Zhang, Qirun and Gu, Tianxiao and Su, Zhendong},
  title = {Perses: Syntax-Guided Program Reduction},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi = {10.1145/3180155.3180236},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  pages = {361--371}
}

The Perses repository is available at https://github.com/uw-pluverse/perses.

Citing the Perses Family

When discussing a particular reducer design, cite the specific technique rather than citing the whole family as a single unit. The Perses-family papers discussed in this book include:

@article{perses-vulcan,
  title = {Pushing the Limit of 1-Minimality of Language-Agnostic Program Reduction},
  author = {Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Zhao, Gaosen and Jiang, Yu and Sun, Chengnian},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {7},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  pages = {636--664},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY, USA}
}

@inproceedings{perses-ppr,
  title = {PPR: Pairwise Program Reduction},
  author = {Zhang, Mengxiao and Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Jiang, Yu and Sun, Chengnian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering},
  pages = {338--349},
  year = {2023}
}

@inproceedings{perses-adhoc,
  author = {Tian, Jia Le and Zhang, Mengxiao and Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Dong, Yiwen and Sun, Chengnian},
  title = {Ad Hoc Syntax-Guided Program Reduction},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi = {10.1145/3611643.3613101},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering},
  pages = {2137--2141}
}

@article{perses-caching,
  title = {On the Caching Schemes to Speed Up Program Reduction},
  author = {Tian, Yongqiang and Zhang, Xueyan and Dong, Yiwen and Xu, Zhenyang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Jiang, Yu and Cheung, Shing-Chi and Sun, Chengnian},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology},
  volume = {33},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1--30},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY, USA}
}

@inproceedings{perses-lpr,
  title = {LPR: Large Language Models-Aided Program Reduction},
  author = {Zhang, Mengxiao and Tian, Yongqiang and Xu, Zhenyang and Dong, Yiwen and Tan, Shin Hwei and Sun, Chengnian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis},
  pages = {261--273},
  year = {2024}
}

@article{perses-trec,
  title = {T-Rec: Fine-Grained Language-Agnostic Program Reduction Guided by Lexical Syntax},
  author = {Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Zhang, Jiarui and Liu, Puzhuo and Jiang, Yu and Sun, Chengnian},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology},
  volume = {34},
  number = {2},
  articleno = {34},
  numpages = {31},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi = {10.1145/3690631}
}

@inproceedings{perses-wdd,
  title = {WDD: Weighted Delta Debugging},
  author = {Zhou, Xintong and Xu, Zhenyang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Tian, Yongqiang and Sun, Chengnian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  pages = {1592--1603},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSE55347.2025.00071},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}
}

@inproceedings{perses-cdd,
  title = {Toward a Better Understanding of Probabilistic Delta Debugging},
  author = {Zhang, Mengxiao and Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Cheng, Xinru and Sun, Chengnian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  pages = {2024--2035},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSE55347.2025.00117},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}
}

@article{perses-sfc,
  title = {Boosting Program Reduction with the Missing Piece of Syntax-Guided Transformations},
  author = {Xu, Zhenyang and Tian, Yongqiang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Sun, Chengnian},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {9},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  articleno = {275},
  pages = {86--112},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3763053},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}
}

@inproceedings{perses-latra,
  title = {Latra: A Template-Based Language-Agnostic Transformation Framework for Effective Program Reduction},
  author = {Xu, Zhenyang and Wang, Yiran and Tian, Yongqiang and Zhang, Mengxiao and Sun, Chengnian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering},
  year = {2025}
}