Related papers: On the Verification of Belief Programs
Context: The complexity of modern safety-critical systems in industries keep on increasing due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods in order to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless,…
Formal Methods are mathematically-based techniques for software design and engineering, which enable the unambiguous description of and reasoning about a system's behaviour. Autonomous systems use software to make decisions without human…
While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models, the faithfulness of the generated rationales remains an open problem for model interpretability. We propose a novel theoretical lens for…
Formal software verification uses mathematical techniques to establish that software has certain properties. For example, that the behaviour of a software system satisfies certain logically-specified properties. Formal methods have a long…
Generalizable robotic mobile manipulation in open-world environments poses significant challenges due to long horizons, complex goals, and partial observability. A promising approach to address these challenges involves planning with a…
We propose a general framework to allow: (a) specifying the operational semantics of a programming language; and (b) stating and proving properties about program correctness. Our framework is based on a many-sorted system of hybrid modal…
Verifying specifications for large-scale modern engineering systems can be a time-consuming task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of modest size. Recently, contract-based design and verification has been proposed…
Trustworthy robot behavior requires not only high levels of task success but also that the robot can reliably quantify how likely it is to succeed. To this end, we present a first-of-its-kind study of confidence calibration in…
Formal verification guarantees proof validity but not formalization faithfulness. For natural-language logical reasoning, where models construct axiom systems from scratch without library constraints, this gap between valid proofs and…
We propose automated techniques for the verification and control of probabilistic real-time systems that are only partially observable. To formally model such systems, we define an extension of probabilistic timed automata in which local…
Most autonomous robotic agents use logic inference to keep themselves to safe and permitted behaviour. Given a set of rules, it is important that the robot is able to establish the consistency between its rules, its perception-based…
We give a relational and a weakest precondition semantics for "knowledge-based programs", i.e., programs that restrict observability of variables so as to richly express changes in the knowledge of agents who can or cannot observe said…
Propositional and modal inclusion logic are formalisms that belong to the family of logics based on team semantics. This article investigates the model checking and validity problems of these logics. We identify complexity bounds for both…
We present a logical framework for the verification of relational properties in imperative programs. Our work is motivated by relational properties which come from security applications and often require reasoning about formulas with…
Nowadays, formal methods are used in various areas for the verification of programs or for code generation from models in order to increase the quality of software and to reduce costs. However, there are still fields in which formal methods…
Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in software engineering and program analysis tasks. They usually take a program and make some predictions about it, e.g., bug prediction. We call these models neural program analyzers. The…
Most recent theoretical literature on program obfuscation is based on notions like Virtual Black Box (VBB) obfuscation and indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO). These notions are very strong and are hard to satisfy. Further, they offer far…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic systems presents unique safety challenges, particularly in unpredictable environments. Although LLMs, leveraging zero-shot learning, enhance human-robot interaction and…
The demonstrated code-understanding capability of LLMs raises the question of whether they can be used for automated program verification, a task that demands high-level abstract reasoning about program properties that is challenging for…
Chain-of-Thought reasoning has emerged as a powerful approach for solving complex mathematical and logical problems. However, it can often veer off track through incorrect or unsubstantiated inferences. Formal mathematical reasoning, which…