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Proving program termination is key to guaranteeing absence of undesirable behaviour, such as hanging programs and even security vulnerabilities such as denial-of-service attacks. To make termination checks scale to large systems,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-05-19 Hong-Yi Chen , Cristina David , Daniel Kroening , Peter Schrammel , Björn Wachter

The problem of determining whether a probabilistic program terminates almost surely (i.e.~with probability one) is undecidable, and actually $\Pi^0_2$-complete. For this reason, a growing literature has explored classes of programs for…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Ugo Dal Lago , Guido Fiorillo , Paolo Pistone

There are many evaluation strategies for term rewrite systems, but automatically proving termination or analyzing complexity is usually easiest for innermost rewriting. Several syntactic criteria exist when innermost termination implies…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Jan-Christoph Kassing , Jürgen Giesl

Our goal is to study the feasibility of porting termination analysis techniques developed for one programming paradigm to another paradigm. In this paper, we show how to adapt termination analysis techniques based on polynomial…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2009-12-23 Manh Thang Nguyen , Danny De Schreye , Jürgen Giesl , Peter Schneider-Kamp

Extending our own and others' earlier approaches to reasoning about termination of probabilistic programs, we propose and prove a new rule for termination with probability one, also known as "almost-certain termination". The rule uses both…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-01-09 Annabelle McIver , Carroll Morgan

Synthesizing ranking functions is a common technique for proving the termination of loops. A ranking function must be bounded and decrease by a specified amount with each iteration for all reachable program states. However, the set of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Yasmin Sarita , Avaljot Singh , Shaurya Gomber , Gagandeep Singh , Mahesh Vishwanathan

We present a new approach to proving non-termination of non-deterministic integer programs. Our technique is rather simple but efficient. It relies on a purely syntactic reversal of the program's transition system followed by a…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Petr Novotný , Đorđe Žikelić

In recent years, numerous techniques were developed to automatically prove termination of different kinds of probabilistic programs. However, there are only few automated methods to disprove their termination. In this paper, we present the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jan-Christoph Kassing , Henri Nagel , Alexander Schlecht , Jürgen Giesl

We study the problem of developing efficient approaches for proving worst-case bounds of non-deterministic recursive programs. Ranking functions are sound and complete for proving termination and worst-case bounds of nonrecursive programs.…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-05-02 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Hongfei Fu , Amir Kafshdar Goharshady

We generalise the termination method of higher-order polynomial interpretations to a setting with impredicative polymorphism. Instead of using weakly monotonic functionals, we interpret terms in a suitable extension of System F-omega. This…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Łukasz Czajka , Cynthia Kop

In this paper we study the complexity of the problems: given a loop, described by linear constraints over a finite set of variables, is there a linear or lexicographical-linear ranking function for this loop? While existence of such…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Amir M. Ben-Amram , Samir Genaim

We consider the problem of expected cost analysis over nondeterministic probabilistic programs, which aims at automated methods for analyzing the resource-usage of such programs. Previous approaches for this problem could only handle…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Peixin Wang , Hongfei Fu , Amir Kafshdar Goharshady , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Xudong Qin , Wenjun Shi

We present a new method for the constraint-based synthesis of termination arguments for linear loop programs based on linear ranking templates. Linear ranking templates are parameterized, well-founded relations such that an assignment to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Jan Leike , Matthias Heizmann

Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-10 Maria I. Gorinova , Dave Moore , Matthew D. Hoffman

We present a heuristic framework for attacking the undecidable termination problem of logic programs, as an alternative to current termination/non-termination proof approaches. We introduce an idea of termination prediction, which predicts…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2009-05-14 Yi-Dong Shen , Danny De Schreye , Dean Voets

We show that universal positive almost sure termination (UPAST) is decidable for a class of simple randomized programs, i.e., it is decidable whether the expected runtime of such a program is finite for all inputs. Our class contains all…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Éléanore Meyer , Jürgen Giesl

We describe an algorithm for proving termination of programs abstracted to systems of monotonicity constraints in the integer domain. Monotonicity constraints are a non-trivial extension of the well-known size-change termination method.…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2011-08-01 Michael Codish , Igor Gonopolskiy , Amir M. Ben-Amram , Carsten Fuhs , Jürgen Giesl

We present a new method for the constraint-based synthesis of termination arguments for linear loop programs based on linear ranking templates. Linear ranking templates are parametrized, well-founded relations such that an assignment to the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2014-01-22 Jan Leike , Matthias Heizmann

Final coalgebras as "categorical greatest fixed points" play a central role in the theory of coalgebras. Somewhat analogously, most proof methods studied therein have focused on greatest fixed-point properties like safety and bisimilarity.…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Natsuki Urabe , Masaki Hara , Ichiro Hasuo

In Bayesian probabilistic programming, a central problem is to estimate the normalised posterior distribution (NPD) of a probabilistic program with conditioning via score (a.k.a. observe) statements. Most previous approaches address this…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Peixin Wang , Tengshun Yang , Hongfei Fu , Guanyan Li , C. -H. Luke Ong