Related papers: On a New Notion of Partial Refinement
It is widely accepted that understanding system requirements is important for software development project success. However, this paper presents two novel challenges to the requirements concept. First, where many plausible approaches to…
We observe that the various formulations of the operational semantics of Constraint Handling Rules proposed over the years fall into a spectrum ranging from the analytical to the pragmatic. While existing analytical formulations facilitate…
In this vision paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities of a form of computation that employs an empirical (rather than a formal) approach, where the solution of a computational problem is returned as empirically most likely…
This paper is a short tutorial introduction to online partial evaluation. We show how to write a simple online partial evaluator for a simple, pure, first-order, functional programming language. In particular, we show that the partial…
We introduce a new methodology based on refinement for testing the functional correctness of hardware and low-level software. Our methodology overcomes several major drawbacks of the de facto testing methodologies used in industry: (1) it…
Recent frontier large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in identifying security vulnerabilities in large, mature open-source systems. As LLM-generated code becomes increasingly common, a natural goal is to prevent such…
We propose a formalism for representation of finite languages, referred to as the class of IDL-expressions, which combines concepts that were only considered in isolation in existing formalisms. The suggested applications are in natural…
Traditional optimizing compilers rely on rewrite rules to iteratively apply program transformations. This iterative approach hides optimization opportunities behind intermediate transformation steps. For instance, vectorization can only be…
Partition refinement is a method for minimizing automata and transition systems of various types. Recently, we have developed a partition refinement algorithm that is generic in the transition type of the given system and matches the run…
Our scientific knowledge is increasingly built on software output. User code which defines data analysis pipelines and computational models is essential for research in the natural and social sciences, but little is known about how to…
Semi-infinite programs are a class of mathematical optimization problems with a finite number of decision variables and infinite constraints. As shown by Blankenship and Falk (Blankenship and Falk. "Infinitely constrained optimization…
The nature of software re-engineering is to improve or transform existing software so it can be understood, controlled and reused as new software. Needs, the necessity of re-engineering software has greatly increased. The system software…
Algorithms typically come with tunable parameters that have a considerable impact on the computational resources they consume. Too often, practitioners must hand-tune the parameters, a tedious and error-prone task. A recent line of research…
We initiate a formal study of reproducibility in optimization. We define a quantitative measure of reproducibility of optimization procedures in the face of noisy or error-prone operations such as inexact or stochastic gradient computations…
This paper aims at integrating heterogeneous documents used in pragmatic software develpoment methods to describe views with a formal refinement based software development process. Therefore we propose an integrated semantics of…
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…
Seeking tighter relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems, semidefinite programming is a generalization of linear programming that offers better bounds and is still polynomially solvable. Yet, in practice, a semidefinite program is…
We describe a design principle for adaptive systems under which adaptation is driven by particular challenges that the environment poses, as opposed to average or otherwise aggregated measures of performance over many challenges. We trace…
A new behavior descriptive entity type called spec is proposed, which combines the traditional interface with test rules and test cases, to completely specify the desired behavior of each method, and to enforce the behavior-wise correctness…
Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…