Related papers: Verifying Programs with Logic and Extended Proof R…

This paper presents a proof system for reasoning about execution time bounds for a core imperative programming language. Proof systems are defined for three different scenarios: approximations of the worst-case execution time, exact time…

Many types of formal verification establish properties about abstract high-level program representations, leaving a large gap to programs at runtime. Although gaps can sometimes be narrowed by techniques such as refinement, a verified…

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…

Despite the tremendous advances that have been made in the last decade on developing useful machine-learning applications, their wider adoption has been hindered by the lack of strong assurance guarantees that can be made about their…

Modern program verifiers use logic-based encodings of the verification problem that are discharged by a back end reasoning engine. However, instances of such encodings for large programs can quickly overwhelm these back end solvers. Hence,…

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an important logic programming paradigm within the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. As a concise, human-readable, declarative language, ASP is an excellent tool for developing trustworthy…

Trustworthy verifiers are essential for the success of reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR), which is the core methodology behind various large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1. In complex domains like mathematical…

Formal verification can provably guarantee the correctness of critical system software, but the high proof burden has long hindered its wide adoption. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in code analysis and synthesis.…

Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…

This paper presents a Hoare-like veri cation framework for discrete probabilistic programs that we apply to two non-trivial sampling algorithms: Lumbroso's Fast Dice Roller and Saad et al.'s Fast Loaded Dice Roller. These algorithms have…

Despite significant advancements in the general capability of large language models (LLMs), they continue to struggle with consistent and accurate reasoning, especially in complex tasks such as mathematical and code reasoning. One key…

Learning neural program embeddings is key to utilizing deep neural networks in program languages research --- precise and efficient program representations enable the application of deep models to a wide range of program analysis tasks.…

We describe verification techniques for embedded memory systems using efficient memory modeling (EMM), without explicitly modeling each memory bit. We extend our previously proposed approach of EMM in Bounded Model Checking (BMC) for a…

We survey the landscape of Hoare logics for quantum programs. We review three papers: "Reasoning about imperative quantum programs" by Chadha, Mateus and Sernadas; "A logic for formal verification of quantum programs" by Yoshihiko Kakutani;…

There is increasing interest in applying verification tools to programs that have bitvector operations. SMT solvers, which serve as a foundation for these tools, have thus increased support for bitvector reasoning through bit-blasting and…

To guarantee that machine learning models yield outputs that are not only accurate, but also robust, recent works propose formally verifying robustness properties of machine learning models. To be applicable to realistic safety-critical…

We present Low*, a language for low-level programming and verification, and its application to high-assurance optimized cryptographic libraries. Low* is a shallow embedding of a small, sequential, well-behaved subset of C in F*, a…

Formal verification provides mathematical guarantees that a software is correct. Design-level verification tools ensure software specifications are correct, but they do not expose defects in actual implementations. For this purpose,…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing competence in solving mathematical reasoning problems. However, many open-source LLMs still struggle with errors in calculation and semantic understanding during intermediate reasoning…

This paper surveys recent work on applying analysis and transformation techniques that originate in the field of constraint logic programming (CLP) to the problem of verifying software systems. We present specialisation-based techniques for…