Related papers: Security Properties through the Lens of Modal Logi…

We generalize the notion of symmetries of propositional formulas in conjunctive normal form to modal formulas. Our framework uses the coinductive models and, hence, the results apply to a wide class of modal logics including, for example,…

For over a decade, researchers in formal methods tried to create formalisms that permit natural specification of systems and allow mathematical reasoning about their correctness. The availability of fully-automated reasoning tools enables…

Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…

We propose here to look at how abstract a model of a usable system can be, but still say something useful and interesting, so this paper is an exercise in abstraction and formalisation, with usability-of-design as an example target use. We…

When we work with information from multiple sources, the formalism each employs to handle uncertainty may not be uniform. In order to be able to combine these knowledge bases of different formats, we need to first establish a common basis…

Formal methods provide remarkable tools allowing for high levels of confidence in the correctness of developments. Their use is therefore encouraged, when not required, for the development of systems in which safety or security is…

Explainability is emerging as a key requirement for autonomous systems. While many works have focused on what constitutes a valid explanation, few have considered formalizing explainability as a system property. In this work, we approach…

As deep neural models in NLP become more complex, and as a consequence opaque, the necessity to interpret them becomes greater. A burgeoning interest has emerged in rationalizing explanations to provide short and coherent justifications for…

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…

In order to automate verification process, regulatory rules written in natural language need to be translated into a format that machines can understand. However, none of the existing formalisms can fully represent the elements that appear…

We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, providing strong security guarantees for components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion goes beyond recent proposals, which protect…

We prove completeness results for a wide variety of intuitionistic conditional logics. We do so by first using a canonical model construction obtain completeness with respect to descriptive conditional frames, and then introducing the…

In this paper, we examine the concept of modularity, an often cited advantage of the ruled-based representation methodology. We argue that the notion of modularity consists of two distinct concepts which we call syntactic modularity and…

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…

Formal explainability guarantees the rigor of computed explanations, and so it is paramount in domains where rigor is critical, including those deemed high-risk. Unfortunately, since its inception formal explainability has been hampered by…

We describe and compare design choices for meta-predicate semantics, as found in representative Prolog module systems and in Logtalk. We look at the consequences of these design choices from a pragmatic perspective, discussing explicit…

Over the past two decades several fragments of first-order logic have been identified and shown to have good computational and algorithmic properties, to a great extent as a result of appropriately describing the image of the standard…

Fusions are a simple way of combining logics. For normal modal logics, fusions have been investigated in detail. In particular, it is known that, under certain conditions, decidability transfers from the component logics to their fusion.…

Early-stage specifications of safety-critical systems are typically expressed in natural language, making it difficult to derive formal properties suitable for verification and needed to guarantee safety. While recent Large Language Model…

Education in the practical applications of logic and proving such as the formal specification and verification of computer programs is substantially hampered by the fact that most time and effort that is invested in proving is actually…