Related papers: Towards Trace-based Deductive Verification (Tech R…
Formal specification languages have long languished, due to the grave scalability problems faced by complete verification methods. Runtime verification promises to use formal specifications to automate part of the more scalable art of…
Invariants are the predominant approach to verify the correctness of loops. As an alternative, loop contracts, which make explicit the premise and conclusion of the underlying induction proof, can sometimes capture correctness conditions…
Tracers provide users with useful information about program executions. In this article, we propose a ``tracer driver''. From a single tracer, it provides a powerful front-end enabling multiple dynamic analysis tools to be easily…
Formal semantics offers a complete and rigorous definition of a language. It is important to define different semantic models for a language and different models serve different purposes. Building equivalence between different semantic…
A bug or error is a common problem that any software or computer program may encounter. It can occur from badly writing the program, a typing error or bad memory management. However, errors can become a significant issue if the unsafe…
We describe a denotational semantics for an abstract effect system for a higher-order, shared-variable concurrent programming language. We prove the soundness of a number of general effect-based program equivalences, including a…
We propose a conceptual integration of deductive program verification into existing user interfaces for software debugging. This integration is well-represented in the "Debug Adapter Protocol", a widely-used and generic technology to…
Current approaches for the discovery, specification, and provision of services ignore the relationship between the service contract and the conditions in which the service can guarantee its contract. Moreover, they do not use formal methods…
Speculative decoding is an effective method for lossless acceleration of large language models during inference. It uses a fast model to draft a block of tokens which are then verified in parallel by the target model, and provides a…
Speculative decoding has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating autoregressive inference by parallelizing token generation through a draft-then-verify paradigm. However, existing methods rely on static drafting lengths and rigid…
We define a new decidable logic for expressing and checking invariants of programs that manipulate dynamically-allocated objects via pointers and destructive pointer updates. The main feature of this logic is the ability to limit the…
When developing complex software and systems, contracts provide a means for controlling the complexity by dividing the responsibilities among the components of the system in a hierarchical fashion. In specific application areas, dedicated…
In order to design and implement tracers, one must decide what exactly to trace and how to produce this trace. On the one hand, trace designs are too often guided by implementation concerns and are not as useful as they should be. On the…
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…
[Context.] The success of deep learning makes its usage more and more tempting in safety-critical applications. However such applications have historical standards (e.g., DO178, ISO26262) which typically do not envision the usage of machine…
Security protocols are concurrent processes that communicate using cryptography with the aim of achieving various security properties. Recent work on their formal verification has brought procedures and tools for deciding trace equivalence…
Getting language models to reason correctly about code requires training on data where each reasoning step can be checked. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by…
Requirement traceability is the process of identifying the inter-dependencies between requirements. It poses a significant challenge when conducted manually, especially when dealing with requirements at various levels of abstraction. In…
Debugging of large software systems consisting of many processes accessing shared resources is a very difficult task. Many commercial systems record essential events during system execution for post-mortem analysis. However, the event…
In a multi-modeling based approach, the system under development is described by several models that represent various perspectives and concerns. Obviously, these partial representations are less complex than the global model, but they need…