English

A Formally Verified IEEE 754 Floating-Point Implementation of Interval Iteration for MDPs

Logic in Computer Science 2025-10-07 v3

Abstract

We present an efficiently executable, formally verified implementation of interval iteration for MDPs. Our correctness proofs span the entire development from the high-level abstract semantics of MDPs to a low-level implementation in LLVM that is based on floating-point arithmetic. We use the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant to verify convergence of our abstract definition of interval iteration and employ step-wise refinement to derive an efficient implementation in LLVM code. To that end, we extend the Isabelle Refinement Framework with support for reasoning about floating-point arithmetic and directed rounding modes. We experimentally demonstrate that the verified implementation is competitive with state-of-the-art tools for MDPs, while providing formal guarantees on the correctness of the results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.10127,
  title  = {A Formally Verified IEEE 754 Floating-Point Implementation of Interval Iteration for MDPs},
  author = {Bram Kohlen and Maximilian Schäffeler and Mohammad Abdulaziz and Arnd Hartmanns and Peter Lammich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.10127},
  year   = {2025}
}