Related papers: Reasoning about Transactional Isolation Levels wit…
Incorrectness Separation Logic (ISL) is a proof system designed to automate verification and detect bugs in programs manipulating heap memories. In this study, we extend ISL to support variable-length array predicates and pointer…
While a number of weak consistency mechanisms have been developed in recent years to improve performance and ensure availability in distributed, replicated systems, ensuring correctness of transactional applications running on top of such…
Strong isolation guarantees, such as serializability and snapshot isolation, are essential for maintaining data consistency and integrity in modern databases. Verifying whether a database upholds its claimed guarantees is increasingly…
Internet browsers use security protocols to protect sensitive messages. An inductive analysis of TLS (a descendant of SSL 3.0) has been performed using the theorem prover Isabelle. Proofs are based on higher-order logic and make no…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstrations of question-answer pairs and it has been shown to have comparable performance to costly model retraining and fine-tuning.…
A natural experiment is a type of observational study in which treatment assignment, though not randomized by the investigator, is plausibly close to random. A process that assigns treatments in a highly nonrandom, inequitable manner may,…
Antonyms vs synonyms distinction is a core challenge in lexico-semantic analysis and automated lexical resource construction. These pairs share a similar distributional context which makes it harder to distinguish them. Leading research in…
Many privacy-type properties of security protocols can be modelled using trace equivalence properties in suitable process algebras. It has been shown that such properties can be decided for interesting classes of finite processes (i.e.,…
Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a widely recognized formal specification language to express rigorous temporal requirements on mixed analog signals produced by cyber-physical systems (CPS). A relevant problem in CPS design is how to…
Differential privacy is a popular privacy model within the research community because of the strong privacy guarantee it offers, namely that the presence or absence of any individual in a data set does not significantly influence the…
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…
Class algebra provides a natural framework for sharing of ISA hierarchies between users that may be unaware of each other's definitions. This permits data from relational databases, object-oriented databases, and tagged XML documents to be…
Large language models show improved downstream task performance when prompted to generate step-by-step reasoning to justify their final answers. These reasoning steps greatly improve model interpretability and verification, but objectively…
To be informative, an evaluation must measure how well systems generalize to realistic unseen data. We identify limitations of and propose improvements to current evaluations of text-to-SQL systems. First, we compare human-generated and…
We propose a formal approach for relating abstract separation logic library specifications with the trace properties they enforce on interactions between a client and a library. Separation logic with abstract predicates enforces a resource…
In this paper, we offer a guide for researchers on evaluating reasoning in language models, building the case that reasoning should be assessed through evidence of adaptive, multi-step search rather than final-answer accuracy alone. Under…
In data analysis, unexpected results often prompt researchers to revisit their procedures to identify potential issues. While some researchers may struggle to identify the root causes, experienced researchers can often quickly diagnose…
In this paper, building on work done on measuring inconsistency in knowledge bases, we introduce inconsistency measures for databases. In particular, focusing on databases with denial constraints, we first consider the natural approach of…
Communicating transactions is a form of distributed, non-isolated transactions which provides a simple construct for building concurrent systems. In this paper we develop a logical framework to express properties of the observable behaviour…