Related papers: Abstracting an operational semantics to finite aut…
Small-step and big-step operational semantics are two fundamental styles of structural operational semantics (SOS), extensively used in practice. The former one is more fine-grained and is usually regarded as primitive, as it only defines a…
As control systems grow in complexity, abstraction-based methods have become essential for designing controllers with formal guarantees. However, a key limitation of these methods is their reliance on discrete-time models, typically…
Heap data is potentially unbounded and seemingly arbitrary. As a consequence, unlike stack and static memory, heap memory cannot be abstracted directly in terms of a fixed set of source variable names appearing in the program being…
Abstracting from a low level to a more explanatory high level of description, and ideally while preserving causal structure, is fundamental to scientific practice, to causal inference problems, and to robust, efficient and interpretable AI.…
Structural causal models (SCMs) are a widespread formalism to deal with causal systems. A recent direction of research has considered the problem of relating formally SCMs at different levels of abstraction, by defining maps between SCMs…
In this paper we provide for parsing with respect to grammars expressed in a general TFS-based formalism, a restriction of ALE. Our motivation being the design of an abstract (WAM-like) machine for the formalism, we consider parsing as a…
Structured recursion schemes such as folds and unfolds have been widely used for structuring both functional programs and program semantics. In this context, it has been customary to implement denotational semantics as folds over an…
We introduce a method for analyzing the complexity of natural language processing tasks, and for predicting the difficulty new NLP tasks. Our complexity measures are derived from the Kolmogorov complexity of a class of automata --- {\it…
Automata over infinite objects are a well-established model with applications in logic and formal verification. Traditionally, acceptance in such automata is defined based on the set of states visited infinitely often during a run. However,…
In a previous paper the authors applied the Abstract Interpretation approach for approximating the probabilistic semantics of biological systems, modeled specifically using the Chemical Ground Form calculus. The methodology is based on the…
We present an abstract machine and a reduction semantics for the lambda-calculus extended with control operators that give access to delimited continuations in the CPS hierarchy. The abstract machine is derived from an evaluator in…
Formal semantics provides rigorous, mathematically precise definitions of programming languages, with which we can argue about program behaviour and program equivalence by formal means; in particular, we can describe and verify our…
Extensions of {\omega}-automata to infinite alphabets typically rely on symbolic guards to keep the transition relation finite, and on registers or memory cells to preserve information from past symbols. Symbolic transitions alone are…
Finite-state models of control systems were proposed by several researchers as a convenient mechanism to synthesize controllers enforcing complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of such symbolic models have two main…
Unlike computation or the numerical analysis of differential equations, simulation does not have a well established conceptual and mathematical foundation. Simulation is an arguable unique union of modeling and computation. However,…
We present and evaluate a technique for computing path-sensitive interference conditions during abstract interpretation of concurrent programs. In lieu of fixed point computation, we use prime event structures to compactly represent causal…
Abstract Interpretation approximates the semantics of a program by mimicking its concrete fixpoint computation on an abstract domain $\mathbb{A}$. The abstract (post-) fixpoint computation is classically divided into two phases: the…
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an important logic programming paradigm within the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. As a concise, human-readable, declarative language, ASP is an excellent tool for developing trustworthy…
In static analysis by abstract interpretation, one often uses widening operators in order to enforce convergence within finite time to an inductive invariant. Certain widening operators, including the classical one over finite polyhedra,…
Explanations of cognitive behavior often appeal to computations over representations. What does it take for a system to implement a given computation over suitable representational vehicles within that system? We argue that the language of…