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Parametric Markov chains (pMC) are used to model probabilistic systems with unknown or partially known probabilities. Although (universal) pMC verification for reachability properties is known to be coETR-complete, there have been efforts…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Kasper Engelen , Guillermo A. Pérez , Shrisha Rao

We propose a sound and complete proof rule ProbTA for quantitative analysis of violation probability of probabilistic programs. Our approach extends the technique of trace abstraction with probability in the control-flow randomness style,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Guanyan Li , Zhilei Han , Fei He

This paper presents a wp-style calculus for obtaining bounds on the expected run-time of probabilistic programs. Its application includes determining the (possibly infinite) expected termination time of a probabilistic program and proving…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Christoph Matheja , Federico Olmedo

A tight upper bound is given on the distribution of the maximum of a supermartingale. Specifically, it is shown that if $Y$ is a semimartingale with initial value zero and quadratic variation process $[Y,Y]$ such that $Y + [Y,Y]$ is a…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-08-15 Bruce Hajek

Randomized higher-order computation can be seen as being captured by a lambda calculus endowed with a single algebraic operation, namely a construct for binary probabilistic choice. What matters about such computations is the probability of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Ugo Dal Lago , Claudia Faggian , Simona Ronchi Della Rocca

Many quantitative properties of probabilistic programs can be characterized as least fixed points, but verifying their lower bounds remains a challenging problem. We present a new approach to lower-bound verification that exploits and…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Satoshi Kura , Hiroshi Unno , Takeshi Tsukada

We introduce a novel approach to the automated termination analysis of computer programs: we use neural networks to represent ranking functions. Ranking functions map program states to values that are bounded from below and decrease as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Mirco Giacobbe , Daniel Kroening , Julian Parsert

We present a novel technique for proving program termination which introduces a new dimension of modularity. Existing techniques use the program to incrementally construct a termination proof. While the proof keeps changing, the program…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-05-26 Pierre Ganty , Samir Genaim

Programs that combine I/O and countable probabilistic choice, modulo either bisimilarity or trace equivalence, can be seen as describing a probabilistic strategy. For well-founded programs, we might expect to axiomatize bisimilarity via a…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Nathan Bowler , Sergey Goncharov , Paul Blain Levy

We present necessary and sufficient conditions for the termination of linear homogeneous programs. We also develop a complete method to check termination for this class of programs. Our complete characterization of termination for such…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2014-09-11 Rachid Rebiha , Arnaldo Vieira Moura , Nadir Matringe

We investigate the problem of safety verification of infinite-state parameterized programs that are formed based on a rich class of topologies. We introduce a new proof system, called parametric proof spaces, which exploits the underlying…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ruotong Cheng , Azadeh Farzan

We consider the problem of refuting equivalence of probabilistic programs, i.e., the problem of proving that two probabilistic programs induce different output distributions. We study this problem in the context of programs with…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Petr Novotný , Đorđe Žikelić

We present an efficient approach to prove termination of monotone programs with integer variables, an expressive class of loops that is often encountered in computer programs. Our approach is based on a lightweight static analysis method…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-02-07 Omar Al-Bataineh , Xie Xiaofei , Mark Reynolds

Probabilistic automata are an extension of nondeterministic finite automata in which transitions are annotated with probabilities. Despite its simplicity, this model is very expressive and many of the associated algorithmic questions are…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Nathanaël Fijalkow , Cristian Riveros , James Worrell

The halting problem is undecidable --- but can it be solved for "most" inputs? This natural question was considered in a number of papers, in different settings. We revisit their results and show that most of them can be easily proven in a…

Logic · Mathematics 2017-01-11 Laurent Bienvenu , Damien Desfontaines , Alexander Shen

We show that for several variations of partially observable Markov decision processes, polynomial-time algorithms for finding control policies are unlikely to or simply don't have guarantees of finding policies within a constant factor or a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. Goldsmith , C. Lusena , M. Mundhenk

We demonstrate a novel strong law of large numbers for branching processes, with a simple proof via measure-theoretic manipulations and spine theory. Roughly speaking, any sequence of events that eventually occurs almost surely for the…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-03-01 Simon C. Harris , Matthew I. Roberts

Dependency pairs are one of the most powerful techniques to analyze termination of term rewrite systems (TRSs) automatically. We adapt the dependency pair framework to the probabilistic setting in order to prove almost-sure innermost…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Jan-Christoph Kassing , Jürgen Giesl

We present $\textit{Probabilistic Total Store Ordering (PTSO)}$ -- a probabilistic extension of the classical TSO semantics. For a given (finite-state) program, the operational semantics of PTSO induces an infinite-state Markov chain. We…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Parosh Aziz Abdulla , Mohamed Faouzi Atig , Raj Aryan Agarwal , Adwait Godbole , Krishna S

The chase procedure is a fundamental algorithmic tool in databases that allows us to reason with constraints, such as existential rules, with a plethora of applications. It takes as input a database and a set of constraints, and iteratively…

Databases · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Marco Calautti , Mostafa Milani , Andreas Pieris