Related papers: Control-Flow Refinement by Partial Evaluation, and…

Programs with multiphase control-flow are programs where the execution passes through several (possibly implicit) phases. Proving termination of such programs (or inferring corresponding runtime bounds) is often challenging since it…

Recently, we showed how to use control-flow refinement (CFR) to improve automatic complexity analysis of integer programs. While up to now CFR was limited to classical programs, in this paper we extend CFR to probabilistic programs and show…

Refinement types enable lightweight verification of functional programs. Algorithms for statically inferring refinement types typically work by reduction to solving systems of constrained Horn clauses extracted from typing derivations. An…

This Survey provides an overview of techniques in termination analysis for programs with numerical variables and transitions defined by linear constraints. This subarea of program analysis is challenging due to the existence of undecidable…

This paper surveys recent work on applying analysis and transformation techniques that originate in the field of constraint logic programming (CLP) to the problem of verifying software systems. We present specialisation-based techniques for…

Static analysis approximates the results of a program by examining only its syntax. For example, control-flow analysis (CFA) determines which syntactic lambdas (for functional languages) or (for object-oriented) methods may be invoked at…

It was previously shown that control-flow refinement can be achieved by a program specializer incorporating property-based abstraction, to improve termination and complexity analysis tools. We now show that this purpose-built specializer…

Several techniques and tools have been developed for verification of properties expressed as Horn clauses with constraints over a background theory (CHC). Current CHC verification tools implement intricate algorithms and are often limited…

We propose a novel method for inferring refinement types of higher-order functional programs. The main advantage of the proposed method is that it can infer maximally preferred (i.e., Pareto optimal) refinement types with respect to a…

Motivated by applications in automated verification of higher-order functional programs, we develop a notion of constrained Horn clauses in higher-order logic and a decision problem concerning their satisfiability. We show that, although…

Formal specification techniques allow expressing idealized specifications, which abstract from restrictions that may arise in implementations. However, partial implementations are universal in software development due to practical…

We present a new approach to termination analysis of numerical computations in logic programs. Traditional approaches fail to analyse them due to non well-foundedness of the integers. We present a technique that allows to overcome these…

Many recent analyses for conventional imperative programs begin by transforming programs into logic programs, capitalising on existing LP analyses and simple LP semantics. We propose using logic programs as an intermediate program…

Simulink/Stateflow charts are widely used in industry for the specification of control systems, which are often safety-critical. This suggests a need for a formal treatment of such models. In previous work, we have proposed a technique for…

Iterative abstraction refinement techniques are one of the most prominent paradigms for the analysis and verification of systems with large or infinite state spaces. This paper investigates the changes of truth values of system properties…

First-order iterative optimization methods play a fundamental role in large scale optimization and machine learning. This paper presents control interpretations for such optimization methods. First, we give loop-shaping interpretations for…

We present a new approach to termination analysis of numerical computations in logic programs. Traditional approaches fail to analyse them due to non well-foundedness of the integers. We present a technique that allows overcoming these…

Acceleration in symbolic verification consists in computing the exact effect of some control-flow loops in order to speed up the iterative fix-point computation of reachable states. Even if no termination guarantee is provided in theory,…

We present an approach to constrained Horn clause (CHC) verification combining three techniques: abstract interpretation over a domain of convex polyhedra, specialisation of the constraints in CHCs using abstract interpretation of…

In a functional language, the dominant control-flow mechanism is function call and return. Most higher-order flow analyses, including k-CFA, do not handle call and return well: they remember only a bounded number of pending calls because…