Related papers: An Abstract Contract Theory for Programs with Proc…
Identifying new viral threats, and developing long term defences against current and future computer viruses, requires an understanding of their behaviour, structure and capabilities. This paper aims to advance this understanding by further…
Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming (tcc) is a declarative model for concurrency offering a logic for specifying reactive systems, i.e. systems that continuously interact with the environment. The universal tcc formalism (utcc) is an…
According to a mainstream position in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, the use of abstract compositional concepts is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the presence of genuine thought. In this article, we show how…
A negotiation process by 2 agents e1 and e2 can be interleaved by another negotiation process between, say, e1 and e3. The interleaving may alter the resource allocation assumed at the inception of the first negotiation process. Existing…
Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and formal…
We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
We introduce a basic model for contracts. Our model extends event structures with a new relation, which faithfully captures the circular dependencies among contract clauses. We establish whether an agreement exists which respects all the…
Verifying a real-world program's functional correctness can be decomposed into (1) a refinement proof showing that the program implements a more abstract high-level program and (2) an algorithm correctness proof at the high level.…
Translating continuous control system models into finite automata allows us to use powerful discrete tools to synthesize controllers for complex specifications. The abstraction construction step is unfortunately hamstrung by high runtime…
While the utility of well-chosen abstractions for understanding and predicting the behaviour of complex systems is well appreciated, precisely what an abstraction $\textit{is}$ has so far has largely eluded mathematical formalization. In…
This research started with an algebra for reasoning about rely/guarantee concurrency for a shared memory model. The approach taken led to a more abstract algebra of atomic steps, in which atomic steps synchronise (rather than interleave)…
In the past decades, many different programming models for managing concurrency in applications have been proposed, such as the actor model, Communicating Sequential Processes, and Software Transactional Memory. The ubiquity of multi-core…
The system PL permits the translation of abstract proofs of program correctness into programs in a variety of programming languages. A programming language satisfying certain axioms may be the target of such a translation. The system PL…
Logic programming is sometimes described as relational programming: a paradigm in which the programmer specifies and composes n-ary relations using systems of constraints. An advanced logic programming environment will provide tools that…
The framework of promise theory offers an alternative way of understanding programming models, especially in distributed systems. We show that promise theory can express some familiar constructs and resolve some problems in program…
Model checking temporal properties of software is algorithmically hard. To be practically feasible, it usually requires the creation of simpler, abstract models of the software, over which the properties are checked. However, creating…
Abstract interpretation has been shown to be a promising technique for the thread-modular verification of concurrent programs. Central to this is the generation of interferences, in the form of rely-guarantee conditions, conforming to a…
Abstraction is a fundamental principle in classical software engineering, which enables modularity, reusability, and scalability. However, quantum programs adhere to fundamentally different semantics, such as unitarity, entanglement, the…
Inference metaprogramming enables effective probabilistic programming by supporting the decomposition of executions of probabilistic programs into subproblems and the deployment of hybrid probabilistic inference algorithms that apply…
Traditional software relies on contracts -- APIs, type systems, assertions -- to specify and enforce correct behavior. AI agents, by contrast, operate on prompts and natural language instructions with no formal behavioral specification.…