Related papers: On Formal Specification of Maple Programs

Albeit being a central notion of every programming language, formally and modularly reasoning about iteration proves itself to be a non-trivial feat, specially in the context of higher-order iteration. In this paper, we present a generic…

There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called…

This work is concerned with the generation of formal specifications from code, using Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with symbolic methods. Concretely, in our study, the programming language is C, the specification language is…

Although they differ in the functionality they offer, low-level systems exhibit certain patterns of design and utilization of computing resources. In this paper, we argue the position that modalities, in the sense of modal logic, should be…

Neural network verification tools currently support only a narrow class of specifications, typically expressed as low-level constraints over raw inputs and outputs. This limitation significantly hinders their adoption and practical…

We study the generalization abilities of language models when translating natural language into formal specifications with complex semantics. In particular, we fine-tune language models on three datasets consisting of English sentences and…

For those of us who generally live in the world of syntax, semantic proof techniques such as reducibility, realizability or logical relations seem somewhat magical despite -- or perhaps due to -- their seemingly unreasonable effectiveness.…

We explore an approach to verification of programs via program transformation applied to an interpreter of a programming language. A specialization technique known as Turchin's supercompilation is used to specialize some interpreters with…

This article revisits standard theorems from elementary number theory from a constructive, algorithmic, and proof-theoretic perspective, framed within the theory of computable functionals TCF. Key examples include B\'ezout's identity, the…

This paper presents a new language called APSL for formally describing protocols to facilitate automated testing. Many real world communication protocols exchange messages whose structures are not trivial, e.g. they may consist of multiple…

We present a simple framework for specifying and proving facts about the input/output behavior of ELF binary files on the x86-64 architecture. A strong emphasis has been placed on simplicity at all levels: the specification says only what…

An algorithm specification in natural language or pseudocode is expected to be clear and explicit enough to enable mechanical execution. In this position paper we contribute an initial characterization of the knowledge that an executing…

Mandating public availability of computer code underlying computational simulation modeling research ends up doing a disservice to the cause of model verification when inconsistencies between the specifications in the publication text and…

The theory of finite term algebras provides a natural framework to describe the semantics of functional languages. The ability to efficiently reason about term algebras is essential to automate program analysis and verification for…

With the progress in deductive program verification research, new tools and techniques have become available to support design-by-contract reasoning about non-trivial programs written in widely-used programming languages. However, deductive…

Writing specifications for computer programs is not easy since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge this conceptual gap we propose controlled natural…

Reliably determining system trajectories is essential in many analysis and control design approaches. To this end, an initial value problem has to be usually solved via numerical algorithms which rely on a certain software realization.…

Epistemic protocol specifications allow programs, for settings in which multiple agents act with incomplete information, to be described in terms of how actions are related to what the agents know. They are a variant of the knowledge-based…

Recent work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are not only a suitable tool for code generation but also capable of generating annotation-based code specifications. Scaling these methodologies may allow us to deduce provable…

Synchronous languages rely on formal methods to ease the development of applications in an efficient and reusable way. Formal methods have been advocated as a means of increasing the reliability of systems, especially those which are safety…