Related papers: Keeping Behavioral Programs Alive: Specifying and …
A value learning system has incentives to follow shutdown instructions, assuming the shutdown instruction provides information (in the technical sense) about which actions lead to valuable outcomes. However, this assumption is not robust to…
Modern systems require programmers to develop code that dynamically adapts to different contexts, leading to the evolution of new context-oriented programming languages. These languages introduce new software-engineering challenges, such…
Behavioral Profile (BP) annotation is difficult to automate because it requires simultaneous coding across multiple linguistic dimensions. We treat BP annotation as a bundle of annotation skills rather than a single task and evaluate…
Recent years have seen a rise in interest in terms of using machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), for production scheduling problems of varying degrees of complexity. The general approach is to break down the…
We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…
The overall problem addressed in this paper is the long-standing problem of program correctness, and in particular programs that describe systems of parallel executing processes. We propose a new method for proving correctness of parallel…
The fundamental idea of this work is to synthesize reactive controllers such that closed-loop execution trajectories of the system satisfy desired specifications that ensure correct system behaviors, while optimizing a desired performance…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Long-run average rewards provide a mathematically elegant formalism for expressing long term performance. Value iteration (VI)…
A classical problem in Software Engineering is how to certify that every system requirement is correctly implemented by source code. This problem, albeit well studied, can still be considered an open one, given the problems faced by…
It is notoriously hard to correctly implement a multiparty protocol which involves asynchronous/concurrent interactions and the constraints on states of multiple participants. To assist developers in implementing such protocols, we propose…
In recent years, robots are used in an increasing variety of tasks, especially by small- and medium- sized enterprises. These tasks are usually fast-changing, they have a collaborative scenario and happen in unpredictable environments with…
A Budgeted Markov Decision Process (BMDP) is an extension of a Markov Decision Process to critical applications requiring safety constraints. It relies on a notion of risk implemented in the shape of a cost signal constrained to lie below…
Developing interactive applications (apps) against event-driven software frameworks such as Android is notoriously difficult. To create apps that behave as expected, developers must follow complex and often implicit asynchronous programming…
This paper presents our findings for using activity modeling for simulation (validation), model checking (verification), and execution purposes. Each is needed to tackle system complexity and further research into behavioral modeling. We…
In order to satisfy safety conditions, an agent may be constrained from acting freely. A safe controller can be designed a priori if an environment is well understood, but not when learning is employed. In particular, reinforcement learned…
To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). Dynamic systems play a central role in fields such as planning, verification, and databases. Fragmented throughout these fields, we find a multitude of languages to formally…
Within Model-Driven Software Engineering, Domain-Specific Modelling has proven to be a powerful technique to specify systems and systems' behaviour in a formal, yet understandable way. Runtime verification (RV) has been successfully used to…
We study black-box testing for stochastic systems and arbitrary $\omega$-regular specifications, explicitly including liveness properties. We are given a finite-state probabilistic system that we can only execute from the initial state. We…
A promising research direction in enabling LLMs to generate consistently correct code involves addressing their inability to properly estimate program execution, particularly for code they generate. In this work, we demonstrate that Code…
In the area of networks, a common method to enforce a security policy expressed in a high-level language is based on an ad-hoc and manual rewriting process. We argue that it is possible to build a formal link between concrete and abstract…