Related papers: Rely/Guarantee, Refinement and the ABA Problem: Pa…
Motivated by applications in automated verification of higher-order functional programs, we develop a notion of constrained Horn clauses in higher-order logic and a decision problem concerning their satisfiability. We show that, although…
Model-driven design of software for safety-critical applications often relies on mathematically grounded techniques such as the B method. Such techniques consist in the successive applications of refinements to derive a concrete…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on retrieved context to guide large language models (LLM), yet treats retrieval as a weak heuristic rather than verifiable evidence -- leading to unsupported answers, hallucinations, and reliance…
Do question answering (QA) modeling improvements (e.g., choice of architecture and training procedure) hold consistently across the diverse landscape of QA benchmarks? To study this question, we introduce the notion of concurrence -- two…
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in financial decision-making, the opacity of complex models presents significant challenges for professionals and regulators. While the field of Explainable AI (XAI) attempts to…
Concurrent accesses to databases are typically encapsulated in transactions in order to enable isolation from other concurrent computations and resilience to failures. Modern databases provide transactions with various semantics…
Linearisability is a central notion for verifying concurrent libraries: a given library is proven safe if its operational history can be rearranged into a new sequential one which, in addition, satisfies a given specification.…
Modern distributed systems often rely on so called weakly-consistent databases, which achieve scalability by sacrificing the consistency guarantee of distributed transaction processing. Such databases have been formalised in two different…
Within the field of Requirements Engineering (RE), the increasing significance of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in aligning AI-supported systems with user needs, societal expectations, and regulatory standards has garnered…
The application considered is mixed-criticality scheduling. The core formal approaches used are Rely-Guarantee conditions and the Timeband framework; these are applied to give a layered description of job scheduling which includes…
Correctness conditions for concurrent objects describe how atomicity of an abstract sequential object may be decomposed. Many different concurrent objects and proof methods for them have been developed. However, arguments about correctness…
In interactions between users and language model agents, user utterances frequently exhibit ellipsis (omission of words or phrases) or imprecision (lack of exactness) to prioritize efficiency. This can lead to varying interpretations of the…
Arguments about the safety, security, and correctness of a complex system are often made in the form of an assurance case. An assurance case is a structured argument, often represented with a graphical interface, that presents and supports…
Causality serves as an abstract notion of time for concurrent systems. A computation is causal, or simply valid, if each observation of a computation event is preceded by the observation of its causes. The present work establishes that this…
This paper introduces an explanation framework designed to enhance the quality of rules in knowledge-based reasoning systems based on dataset-driven insights. The traditional method for rule induction from data typically requires…
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…
Consistent answers to a query from a possibly inconsistent database are answers that are simultaneously retrieved from every possible repair of the database. Repairs are consistent instances that minimally differ from the original…
Linearizability of concurrent data structures is usually proved by monolithic simulation arguments relying on the identification of the so-called linearization points. Regrettably, such proofs, whether manual or automatic, are often…
Providing finite-time probabilistic safety and reach-avoid guarantees is crucial for safety-critical stochastic systems. Existing state-of-the-art barrier methods often rely on a restrictive boundedness assumption for auxiliary functions,…
The rely-guarantee approach is a promising way for compositional verification of concurrent reactive systems (CRSs), e.g. concurrent operating systems, interrupt-driven control systems and business process systems. However, specifications…