Automata and Equations based Approximations for Reachability Analysis

Invited talkInternational audienceTerm Rewriting Systems (TRSs for short) are a convenient formal model for software systems. This formalism is expressive enough to model in a simple and accurate way many aspects of computation such as: recursivity, non-determinism, parallelism, distribution, communication. On such models, verification is facilitated by the large collection of proof techniques of rewriting: termination, non-termination, confluence, non-confluence, reachability, unreachability, inductive properties, etc. This talk focuses on unreachability properties of a TRS, which entails safety properties on the modeled software system. Starting from a single term s, proving that t is unreachable, i.e., s → * R t is straightforward if R is terminating. This problem is undecidable if R is not terminating or if we consider infinite sets of initial terms s and infinite sets of " Bad " terms t. There exists TRSs classes for which those problems are decidable. For those classes, decidability comes from the fact that the set of reachable terms is regular, i.e., it can be recognized by a tree automaton [5]. Those classes are surveyed in [7]. However, TRSs modeling software systems do not belong to those " decid-able classes " , in general. The rewriting and tree automata community have proposed different techniques to over-approximate the set of reachable terms. Over-approximating reachable terms provide a criterion for unreachability on TRSs and, thus, a criterion for safety of the modeled systems. Those approximation techniques range from TRSs transformation [11], ad hoc automata transformations [6,10,3], CounterExample-Guided Abstraction Refinement (CEGAR) [4,2,1], and abstraction by equational theories [12,9]. I will present the principles underlying those techniques, discuss their pros and cons, and recall some of their applications. Then, I will present a recent attempt to combine abstraction by equational theories and CEGAR to infer accurate over-approximations for TRSs modeling higher-order functional programs [8]

Automata and Equations based Approximations for Reachability Analysis

Invited talkInternational audienceTerm Rewriting Systems (TRSs for short) are a convenient formal model for software systems. This formalism is expressive enough to model in a simple and accurate way many aspects of computation such as: recursivity, non-determinism, parallelism, distribution, communication. On such models, verification is facilitated by the large collection of proof techniques of rewriting: termination, non-termination, confluence, non-confluence, reachability, unreachability, inductive properties, etc. This talk focuses on unreachability properties of a TRS, which entails safety properties on the modeled software system. Starting from a single term s, proving that t is unreachable, i.e., s → * R t is straightforward if R is terminating. This problem is undecidable if R is not terminating or if we consider infinite sets of initial terms s and infinite sets of " Bad " terms t. There exists TRSs classes for which those problems are decidable. For those classes, decidability comes from the fact that the set of reachable terms is regular, i.e., it can be recognized by a tree automaton [5]. Those classes are surveyed in [7]. However, TRSs modeling software systems do not belong to those " decid-able classes " , in general. The rewriting and tree automata community have proposed different techniques to over-approximate the set of reachable terms. Over-approximating reachable terms provide a criterion for unreachability on TRSs and, thus, a criterion for safety of the modeled systems. Those approximation techniques range from TRSs transformation [11], ad hoc automata transformations [6,10,3], CounterExample-Guided Abstraction Refinement (CEGAR) [4,2,1], and abstraction by equational theories [12,9]. I will present the principles underlying those techniques, discuss their pros and cons, and recall some of their applications. Then, I will present a recent attempt to combine abstraction by equational theories and CEGAR to infer accurate over-approximations for TRSs modeling higher-order functional programs [8]

Sparse Tiling Through Overlap Closures for Termination of String Rewriting

A strictly locally testable language is characterized by its set of admissible factors, prefixes and suffixes, called tiles. We over-approximate reachability sets in string rewriting by languages defined by sparse sets of tiles, containing only those that are reachable in derivations. Using the partial algebra defined by a tiling for semantic labeling, we obtain a transformational method for proving local termination. These algebras can be represented efficiently as finite automata of a certain shape. Using a known result on forward closures, and a new characterisation of overlap closures, we can automatically prove termination and relative termination, respectively. We report on experiments showing the strength of the method

Confluence of Layered Rewrite Systems

We investigate a new, Turing-complete class of layered systems, whose linearized lefthand sides of rules can only be overlapped at the root position. Layered systems define a natural notion of rank for terms: the maximal number of redexes along a path from the root to a leaf. Overlappings are allowed in finite or infinite trees. Rules may be non-terminating, non-left-linear, or non-right- linear. Using a novel unification technique, cyclic unification, we show that rank non-increasing layered systems are confluent provided their cyclic critical pairs have cyclic-joinable decreasing diagrams

Analysing Parallel Complexity of Term Rewriting

We revisit parallel-innermost term rewriting as a model of parallel computation on inductive data structures and provide a corresponding notion of runtime complexity parametric in the size of the start term. We propose automatic techniques to derive both upper and lower bounds on parallel complexity of rewriting that enable a direct reuse of existing techniques for sequential complexity. The applicability and the precision of the method are demonstrated by the relatively light effort in extending the program analysis tool AProVE and by experiments on numerous benchmarks from the literature.Comment: Extended authors' accepted manuscript for a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on Logic-based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2022). 27 page

Higher-Order Pattern Anti-Unification in Linear Time

We present a rule-based Huet’s style anti-unification algorithm for simply typed lambda-terms, which computes a least general higher-order pattern generalization. For a pair of arbitrary terms of the same type, such a generalization always exists and is unique modulo α-equivalence and variable renaming. With a minor modification, the algorithm works for untyped lambda-terms as well. The time complexity of both algorithms is linear.This research has been partially supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project SToUT (P 24087-N18), the Upper Austrian Government strategic program “Innovatives OÖ 2010plus”, the MINECO projects RASO (TIN2015-71799-C2-1-P) and HeLo (TIN2012-33042), the MINECO/FEDER UE project LoCoS (TIN2015-66293-R) and the UdG project MPCUdG2016/055.Peer Reviewe

On Complexity Bounds and Confluence of Parallel Term Rewriting

We revisit parallel-innermost term rewriting as a model of parallel computation on inductive data structures and provide a corresponding notion of runtime complexity parametric in the size of the start term. We propose automatic techniques to derive both upper and lower bounds on parallel complexity of rewriting that enable a direct reuse of existing techniques for sequential complexity. Our approach to find lower bounds requires confluence of the parallel-innermost rewrite relation, thus we also provide effective sufficient criteria for proving confluence. The applicability and the precision of the method are demonstrated by the relatively light effort in extending the program analysis tool AProVE and by experiments on numerous benchmarks from the literature.Comment: Under submission to Fundamenta Informaticae. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.0100