Models for logics and conditional constraints in automated proofs of termination

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13770-4_3Reasoning about termination of declarative programs, which are described by means of a computational logic, requires the definition of appropriate abstractions as semantic models of the logic, and also handling the conditional constraints which are often obtained. The formal treatment of such constraints in automated proofs, often using numeric interpretations and (arithmetic) constraint solving can greatly benefit from appropriate techniques to deal with the conditional (in)equations at stake. Existing results from linear algebra or real algebraic geometry are useful to deal with them but have received only scant attention to date. We investigate the definition and use of numeric models for logics and the resolution of linear and algebraic conditional constraints as unifying techniques for proving termination of declarative programs.Developed during a sabbatical year at UIUC. Supported by projects NSF CNS13-19109, MINECO TIN2010-21062-C02-02 and TIN2013-45732-C4-1-P, and GV BEST/2014/026 and PROMETEO/2011/052.Lucas Alba, S.; Meseguer, J. (2014). Models for logics and conditional constraints in automated proofs of termination. En Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation. Springer Verlag (Germany). 9-20. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13770-4_3S920Alarcón, B., Gutiérrez, R., Lucas, S., Navarro-Marset, R.: Proving Termination Properties with mu-term. In: Johnson, M., Pavlovic, D. (eds.) AMAST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6486, pp. 201–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Alarcón, B., Lucas, S., Navarro-Marset, R.: Using Matrix Interpretations over the Reals in Proofs of Termination. In: Proc. of PROLE 2009, pp. 255–264 (2009)Clavel, M., Durán, F., Eker, S., Lincoln, P., Martí-Oliet, N., Meseguer, J., Talcott, C. (eds.): All About Maude - A High-Performance Logical Framework. LNCS, vol. 4350. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)Contejean, E., Marché, C., Tomás, A.-P., Urbain, X.: Mechanically proving termination using polynomial interpretations. J. of Aut. Reas. 34(4), 325–363 (2006)Endrullis, J., Waldmann, J., Zantema, H.: Matrix Interpretations for Proving Termination of Term Rewriting. J. of Aut. Reas. 40(2-3), 195–220 (2008)Fuhs, C., Giesl, J., Middeldorp, A., Schneider-Kamp, P., Thiemann, R., Zankl, H.: Maximal Termination. In: Voronkov, A. (ed.) RTA 2008. LNCS, vol. 5117, pp. 110–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Futatsugi, K., Diaconescu, R.: CafeOBJ Report. AMAST Series. World Scientific (1998)Hudak, P., Peyton-Jones, S.J., Wadler, P.: Report on the Functional Programming Language Haskell: a non–strict, purely functional language. Sigplan Notices 27(5), 1–164 (1992)Lucas, S.: Context-sensitive computations in functional and functional logic programs. Journal of Functional and Logic Programming 1998(1), 1–61 (1998)Lucas, S.: Polynomials over the reals in proofs of termination: from theory to practice. RAIRO Theoretical Informatics and Applications 39(3), 547–586 (2005)Lucas, S., Marché, C., Meseguer, J.: Operational termination of conditional term rewriting systems. Information Processing Letters 95, 446–453 (2005)Lucas, S., Meseguer, J.: Proving Operational Termination of Declarative Programs in General Logics. In: Proc. of PPDP 2014, pp. 111–122. ACM Digital Library (2014)Lucas, S., Meseguer, J.: 2D Dependency Pairs for Proving Operational Termination of CTRSs. In: Proc. of WRLA 2014. LNCS, vol. 8663 (to appear, 2014)Lucas, S., Meseguer, J., Gutiérrez, R.: Extending the 2D DP Framework for CTRSs. In: Selected papers of LOPSTR 2014. LNCS (to appear, 2015)Meseguer, J.: General Logics. In: Ebbinghaus, H.-D., et al. (eds.) Logic Colloquium 1987, pp. 275–329. North-Holland (1989)Nguyen, M.T., de Schreye, D., Giesl, J., Schneider-Kamp, P.: Polytool: Polynomial interpretations as a basis for termination of logic programs. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 11(1), 33–63 (2011)Ohlebusch, E.: Advanced Topics in Term Rewriting. Springer (April 2002)Prestel, A., Delzell, C.N.: Positive Polynomials. In: From Hilbert’s 17th Problem to Real Algebra. Springer, Berlin (2001)Podelski, A., Rybalchenko, A.: A Complete Method for the Synthesis of Linear Ranking Functions. In: Steffen, B., Levi, G. (eds.) VMCAI 2004. LNCS, vol. 2937, pp. 239–251. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Schrijver, A.: Theory of linear and integer programming. John Wiley & Sons (1986)Zantema, H.: Termination of Context-Sensitive Rewriting. In: Comon, H. (ed.) RTA 1997. LNCS, vol. 1232, pp. 172–186. Springer, Heidelberg (1997

Polytool: polynomial interpretations as a basis for termination analysis of Logic programs

Our goal is to study the feasibility of porting termination analysis techniques developed for one programming paradigm to another paradigm. In this paper, we show how to adapt termination analysis techniques based on polynomial interpretations - very well known in the context of term rewrite systems (TRSs) - to obtain new (non-transformational) ter- mination analysis techniques for definite logic programs (LPs). This leads to an approach that can be seen as a direct generalization of the traditional techniques in termination analysis of LPs, where linear norms and level mappings are used. Our extension general- izes these to arbitrary polynomials. We extend a number of standard concepts and results on termination analysis to the context of polynomial interpretations. We also propose a constraint-based approach for automatically generating polynomial interpretations that satisfy the termination conditions. Based on this approach, we implemented a new tool, called Polytool, for automatic termination analysis of LPs

CoLoR: a Coq library on well-founded rewrite relations and its application to the automated verification of termination certificates

Termination is an important property of programs; notably required for programs formulated in proof assistants. It is a very active subject of research in the Turing-complete formalism of term rewriting systems, where many methods and tools have been developed over the years to address this problem. Ensuring reliability of those tools is therefore an important issue. In this paper we present a library formalizing important results of the theory of well-founded (rewrite) relations in the proof assistant Coq. We also present its application to the automated verification of termination certificates, as produced by termination tools

Polynomial Interpretations over the Natural, Rational and Real Numbers Revisited

Polynomial interpretations are a useful technique for proving termination of term rewrite systems. They come in various flavors: polynomial interpretations with real, rational and integer coefficients. As to their relationship with respect to termination proving power, Lucas managed to prove in 2006 that there are rewrite systems that can be shown polynomially terminating by polynomial interpretations with real (algebraic) coefficients, but cannot be shown polynomially terminating using polynomials with rational coefficients only. He also proved the corresponding statement regarding the use of rational coefficients versus integer coefficients. In this article we extend these results, thereby giving the full picture of the relationship between the aforementioned variants of polynomial interpretations. In particular, we show that polynomial interpretations with real or rational coefficients do not subsume polynomial interpretations with integer coefficients. Our results hold also for incremental termination proofs with polynomial interpretations.Comment: 28 pages; special issue of RTA 201

Automated verification of termination certificates

In order to increase user confidence, many automated theorem provers provide certificates that can be independently verified. In this paper, we report on our progress in developing a standalone tool for checking the correctness of certificates for the termination of term rewrite systems, and formally proving its correctness in the proof assistant Coq. To this end, we use the extraction mechanism of Coq and the library on rewriting theory and termination called CoLoR

Polynomial Interpretations for Higher-Order Rewriting

The termination method of weakly monotonic algebras, which has been defined for higher-order rewriting in the HRS formalism, offers a lot of power, but has seen little use in recent years. We adapt and extend this method to the alternative formalism of algebraic functional systems, where the simply-typed lambda-calculus is combined with algebraic reduction. Using this theory, we define higher-order polynomial interpretations, and show how the implementation challenges of this technique can be tackled. A full implementation is provided in the termination tool WANDA

Synthesis of sup-interpretations: a survey

In this paper, we survey the complexity of distinct methods that allow the programmer to synthesize a sup-interpretation, a function providing an upper- bound on the size of the output values computed by a program. It consists in a static space analysis tool without consideration of the time consumption. Although clearly related, sup-interpretation is independent from termination since it only provides an upper bound on the terminating computations. First, we study some undecidable properties of sup-interpretations from a theoretical point of view. Next, we fix term rewriting systems as our computational model and we show that a sup-interpretation can be obtained through the use of a well-known termination technique, the polynomial interpretations. The drawback is that such a method only applies to total functions (strongly normalizing programs). To overcome this problem we also study sup-interpretations through the notion of quasi-interpretation. Quasi-interpretations also suffer from a drawback that lies in the subterm property. This property drastically restricts the shape of the considered functions. Again we overcome this problem by introducing a new notion of interpretations mainly based on the dependency pairs method. We study the decidability and complexity of the sup-interpretation synthesis problem for all these three tools over sets of polynomials. Finally, we take benefit of some previous works on termination and runtime complexity to infer sup-interpretations.Comment: (2012

12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012) : WST 2012, February 19–23, 2012, Obergurgl, Austria / ed. by Georg Moser

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012), to be held February 19–23, 2012 in Obergurgl, Austria. The goal of the Workshop on Termination is to be a venue for presentation and discussion of all topics in and around termination. In this way, the workshop tries to bridge the gaps between different communities interested and active in research in and around termination. The 12th International Workshop on Termination in Obergurgl continues the successful workshops held in St. Andrews (1993), La Bresse (1995), Ede (1997), Dagstuhl (1999), Utrecht (2001), Valencia (2003), Aachen (2004), Seattle (2006), Paris (2007), Leipzig (2009), and Edinburgh (2010). The 12th International Workshop on Termination did welcome contributions on all aspects of termination and complexity analysis. Contributions from the imperative, constraint, functional, and logic programming communities, and papers investigating applications of complexity or termination (for example in program transformation or theorem proving) were particularly welcome. We did receive 18 submissions which all were accepted. Each paper was assigned two reviewers. In addition to these 18 contributed talks, WST 2012, hosts three invited talks by Alexander Krauss, Martin Hofmann, and Fausto Spoto

Using Representation Theorems for Proving Polynomials Non-negative

Proving polynomials non-negative when variables range on a subset of numbers (e.g., [0, +∞)) is often required in many applications (e.g., in the analysis of program termination). Several representations for univariate polynomials P that are non-negative on [0, +∞) have been investigated. They can often be used to characterize the property, thus providing a method for checking it by trying a match of P against the representation. We introduce a new characterization based on viewing polynomials P as vectors, and find the appropriate polynomial basis B in which the non-negativeness of the coordinates [P]B representing P in B witnesses that P is non-negative on [0, +∞). Matching a polynomial against a representation provides a way to transform universal sentences ∀x ∈ [0, +∞) P(x) ≥ 0 into a constraint solving problem which can be solved by using efficient methods. We consider different approaches to solve both kind of problems and provide a quantitative evaluation of performance that points to an early result by P´olya and Szeg¨o’s as an appropriate basis for implementations in most cases.Lucas Alba, S. (2014). Using Representation Theorems for Proving Polynomials Non-negative. En Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation: 12th International Conference, AISC 2014, Seville, Spain, December 11-13, 2014. Proceedings. Springer Verlag (Germany). 21-33. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13770-4_4S2133Alarcón, B., Gutiérrez, R., Lucas, S., Navarro-Marset, R.: Proving Termination Properties with mu-term. In: Johnson, M., Pavlovic, D. (eds.) AMAST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6486, pp. 201–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Basu, S., Pollack, R., Roy, M.-F.: Algorithms in Real Algebraic Geometry. Springer, Berlin (2006)Bernstein, S.: Démonstration du théorème de Weierstrass fondée sur le calcul des probabilités. Communic. Soc. Math. de Kharkow 13(2), 1–2 (1912)Bernstein, S.: Sur la répresentation des polynômes positifs. Communic. Soc. Math. de Kharkow 14(2), 227–228 (1915)Borralleras, C., Lucas, S., Oliveras, A., Rodríguez, E., Rubio, A.: SAT Modulo Linear Arithmetic for Solving Polynomial Constraints. Journal of Automated Reasoning 48, 107–131 (2012)Boudaoud, F., Caruso, F., Roy, M.-F.: Certificates of Positivity in the Bernstein Basis. Discrete Computational Geometry 39, 639–655 (2008)Choi, M.D., Lam, T.Y., Reznick, B.: Sums of squares of real polynomials. In: Proc. of the Symposium on Pure Mathematics, vol. 4, pp. 103–126. American Mathematical Society (1995)Contejean, E., Marché, C., Tomás, A.-P., Urbain, X.: Mechanically proving termination using polynomial interpretations. Journal of Automated Reasoning 32(4), 315–355 (2006)Hilbert, D.: Über die Darstellung definiter Formen als Summe von Formenquadraten. Mathematische Annalen 32, 342–350 (1888)Hong, H., Jakuš, D.: Testing Positiveness of Polynomials. Journal of Automated Reasoning 21, 23–38 (1998)Karlin, S., Studden, W.J.: Tchebycheff systems: with applications in analysis and statistics. Interscience, New York (1966)Lucas, S.: Polynomials over the reals in proofs of termination: from theory to practice. RAIRO Theoretical Informatics and Applications 39(3), 547–586 (2005)Polya, G., Szegö, G.: Problems and Theorems in Analysis II. Springer (1976)Powers, V., Reznick, B.: Polynomials that are positive on an interval. Transactions of the AMS 352(10), 4677–4692 (2000)Powers, V., Wörmann, T.: An algorithm for sums of squares of real polynomials. Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 127, 99–104 (1998