16,508 research outputs found
Use of metaknowledge in the verification of knowledge-based systems
Knowledge-based systems are modeled as deductive systems. The model indicates that the two primary areas of concern in verification are demonstrating consistency and completeness. A system is inconsistent if it asserts something that is not true of the modeled domain. A system is incomplete if it lacks deductive capability. Two forms of consistency are discussed along with appropriate verification methods. Three forms of incompleteness are discussed. The use of metaknowledge, knowledge about knowledge, is explored in connection to each form of incompleteness
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
A Theory of Formal Synthesis via Inductive Learning
Formal synthesis is the process of generating a program satisfying a
high-level formal specification. In recent times, effective formal synthesis
methods have been proposed based on the use of inductive learning. We refer to
this class of methods that learn programs from examples as formal inductive
synthesis. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for formal
inductive synthesis. We discuss how formal inductive synthesis differs from
traditional machine learning. We then describe oracle-guided inductive
synthesis (OGIS), a framework that captures a family of synthesizers that
operate by iteratively querying an oracle. An instance of OGIS that has had
much practical impact is counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). We
present a theoretical characterization of CEGIS for learning any program that
computes a recursive language. In particular, we analyze the relative power of
CEGIS variants where the types of counterexamples generated by the oracle
varies. We also consider the impact of bounded versus unbounded memory
available to the learning algorithm. In the special case where the universe of
candidate programs is finite, we relate the speed of convergence to the notion
of teaching dimension studied in machine learning theory. Altogether, the
results of the paper take a first step towards a theoretical foundation for the
emerging field of formal inductive synthesis
Automating Deductive Verification for Weak-Memory Programs
Writing correct programs for weak memory models such as the C11 memory model
is challenging because of the weak consistency guarantees these models provide.
The first program logics for the verification of such programs have recently
been proposed, but their usage has been limited thus far to manual proofs.
Automating proofs in these logics via first-order solvers is non-trivial, due
to reasoning features such as higher-order assertions, modalities and rich
permission resources. In this paper, we provide the first implementation of a
weak memory program logic using existing deductive verification tools. We
tackle three recent program logics: Relaxed Separation Logic and two forms of
Fenced Separation Logic, and show how these can be encoded using the Viper
verification infrastructure. In doing so, we illustrate several novel encoding
techniques which could be employed for other logics. Our work is implemented,
and has been evaluated on examples from existing papers as well as the Facebook
open-source Folly library.Comment: Extended version of TACAS 2018 publicatio
Fifty years of Hoare's Logic
We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin
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