English
Related papers

Related papers: Probabilistic Program Verification via Inductive S…

200 papers

We study a syntax for specifying quantitative "assertions" - functions mapping program states to numbers - for probabilistic program verification. We prove that our syntax is expressive in the following sense: Given any probabilistic…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Kevin Batz , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Christoph Matheja

Provably correct software is one of the key challenges in our softwaredriven society. While formal verification establishes the correctness of a given program, the result of program synthesis is a program which is correct by construction.…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Andreas Humenberger , Laura Kovacs

We develop an approach to estimate the probability that a program sampled from a large language model is correct. Given a natural language description of a programming problem, our method samples both candidate programs as well as candidate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Darren Key , Wen-Ding Li , Kevin Ellis

Morgan and McIver's weakest pre-expectation framework is one of the most well-established methods for deductive verification of probabilistic programs. Roughly, the idea is to generalize binary state assertions to real-valued expectations,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Jialu Bao , Nitesh Trivedi , Drashti Pathak , Justin Hsu , Subhajit Roy

This abstract extends on the previous work (arXiv:1407.2646, arXiv:1606.00075) on program induction using probabilistic programming. It describes possible further steps to extend that work, such that, ultimately, automatic probabilistic…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-10-04 Yura Perov

Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Katrine Christensen , Mahsa Varshosaz , Raúl Pardo

Quantitative loop invariants are an essential element in the verification of probabilistic programs. Recently, multivariate Lagrange interpolation has been applied to synthesizing polynomial invariants. In this paper, we propose an…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Yijun Feng , Lijun Zhang , David N. Jansen , Naijun Zhan , Bican Xia

Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Maria I. Gorinova

Decidability and synthesis of inductive invariants ranging in a given domain play an important role in many software and hardware verification systems. We consider here inductive invariants belonging to an abstract domain $A$ as defined in…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Francesco Ranzato

We present a data-driven approach to the quantitative verification of probabilistic programs and stochastic dynamical models. Our approach leverages neural networks to compute tight and sound bounds for the probability that a stochastic…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Alessandro Abate , Alec Edwards , Mirco Giacobbe , Hashan Punchihewa , Diptarko Roy

We describe a system to prove properties of programs. The key feature of this approach is a method to automatically synthesize inductive invariants of the loops contained in the program. The method is generic, i.e., it applies to a large…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Mnacho Echenim , Nicolas Peltier , Yanis Sellami

Bhat et al. developed an inductive compiler that computes density functions for probability spaces described by programs in a simple probabilistic functional language. In this work, we implement such a compiler for a modified version of…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Manuel Eberl , Johannes Hölzl , Tobias Nipkow

Probabilistic programming is a rapidly developing programming paradigm which enables the formulation of Bayesian models as programs and the automation of posterior inference. It facilitates the development of models and conducting Bayesian…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Nathanael Nussbaumer , Markus Böck , Jürgen Cito

Probabilistic programming is perfectly suited to reliable and transparent data science, as it allows the user to specify their models in a high-level language without worrying about the complexities of how to fit the models. Static analysis…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-31 Ryan Bernstein , Matthijs Vákár , Jeannette Wing

Synthesizing inductive loop invariants is fundamental to automating program verification. In this work, we observe that Large Language Models (such as gpt-3.5 or gpt-4) are capable of synthesizing loop invariants for a class of programs in…

We present a method for synthesizing recursive functions that provably satisfy a given specification in the form of a polymorphic refinement type. We observe that such specifications are particularly suitable for program synthesis for two…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-04-22 Nadia Polikarpova , Ivan Kuraj , Armando Solar-Lezama

Infinite-state systems such as distributed protocols are challenging to verify using interactive theorem provers or automatic verification tools. Of these techniques, deductive verification is highly expressive but requires the user to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Yotam M. Y. Feldman , James R. Wilcox , Sharon Shoham , Mooly Sagiv

In probabilistic program analysis, quantitative analysis aims at deriving tight numerical bounds for probabilistic properties such as expectation and assertion probability. Most previous works consider numerical bounds over the whole…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Tengshun Yang , Shenghua Feng , Hongfei Fu , Naijun Zhan , Jingyu Ke , Shiyang Wu

The discovery of inductive invariants lies at the heart of static program verification. Presently, many automatic solutions to inductive invariant generation are inflexible, only applicable to certain classes of programs, or unpredictable.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-06-16 Adam Betts , Nathan Chong , Pantazis Deligiannis , Alastair F. Donaldson , Jeroen Ketema

Provably correct software is one of the key challenges of our software-driven society. Program synthesis -- the task of constructing a program satisfying a given specification -- is one strategy for achieving this. The result of this task…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Andreas Humenberger , Daneshvar Amrollahi , Nikolaj Bjørner , Laura Kovács