1,475 research outputs found
Horn Binary Serialization Analysis
A bit layout is a sequence of fields of certain bit lengths that specifies
how to interpret a serial stream, e.g., the MP3 audio format. A layout with
variable length fields needs to include meta-information to help the parser
interpret unambiguously the rest of the stream; e.g. a field providing the
length of a following variable length field. If no such information is
available, then the layout is ambiguous. I present a linear-time algorithm to
determine whether a layout is ambiguous or not by modelling the behaviour of a
serial parser reading the stream as forward chaining reasoning on a collection
of Horn clauses.Comment: In Proceedings HCVS2016, arXiv:1607.0403
Database Queries that Explain their Work
Provenance for database queries or scientific workflows is often motivated as
providing explanation, increasing understanding of the underlying data sources
and processes used to compute the query, and reproducibility, the capability to
recompute the results on different inputs, possibly specialized to a part of
the output. Many provenance systems claim to provide such capabilities;
however, most lack formal definitions or guarantees of these properties, while
others provide formal guarantees only for relatively limited classes of
changes. Building on recent work on provenance traces and slicing for
functional programming languages, we introduce a detailed tracing model of
provenance for multiset-valued Nested Relational Calculus, define trace slicing
algorithms that extract subtraces needed to explain or recompute specific parts
of the output, and define query slicing and differencing techniques that
support explanation. We state and prove correctness properties for these
techniques and present a proof-of-concept implementation in Haskell.Comment: PPDP 201
Hidden-Markov Program Algebra with iteration
We use Hidden Markov Models to motivate a quantitative compositional
semantics for noninterference-based security with iteration, including a
refinement- or "implements" relation that compares two programs with respect to
their information leakage; and we propose a program algebra for source-level
reasoning about such programs, in particular as a means of establishing that an
"implementation" program leaks no more than its "specification" program.
This joins two themes: we extend our earlier work, having iteration but only
qualitative, by making it quantitative; and we extend our earlier quantitative
work by including iteration. We advocate stepwise refinement and
source-level program algebra, both as conceptual reasoning tools and as targets
for automated assistance. A selection of algebraic laws is given to support
this view in the case of quantitative noninterference; and it is demonstrated
on a simple iterated password-guessing attack
Planning as Tabled Logic Programming
This paper describes Picat's planner, its implementation, and planning models
for several domains used in International Planning Competition (IPC) 2014.
Picat's planner is implemented by use of tabling. During search, every state
encountered is tabled, and tabled states are used to effectively perform
resource-bounded search. In Picat, structured data can be used to avoid
enumerating all possible permutations of objects, and term sharing is used to
avoid duplication of common state data. This paper presents several modeling
techniques through the example models, ranging from designing state
representations to facilitate data sharing and symmetry breaking, encoding
actions with operations for efficient precondition checking and state updating,
to incorporating domain knowledge and heuristics. Broadly, this paper
demonstrates the effectiveness of tabled logic programming for planning, and
argues the importance of modeling despite recent significant progress in
domain-independent PDDL planners.Comment: 27 pages in TPLP 201
Extending monads with pattern matching
Sequencing of effectful computations can be neatly captured using monads and elegantly written using do notation. In practice such monads often allow additional ways of composing computations, which have to be written explicitly using combinators. We identify joinads, an abstract notion of computation that is stronger than monads and captures many such ad-hoc extensions. In particular, joinads are monads with three additional operations: one of type m a → m b → m (a, b) captures various forms of parallel composition, one of type m a → m a → m a that is inspired by choice and one of type m a → m (m a) that captures aliasing of computations. Algebraically, the first two operations form a near-semiring with commutative multiplication. We introduce docase notation that can be viewed as a monadic version of case. Joinad laws imply various syntactic equivalences of programs written using docase that are analogous to equiva-lences about case. Examples of joinads that benefit from the nota-tion include speculative parallelism, waiting for a combination of user interface events, but also encoding of validation rules using the intersection of parsers
Logic Programming Applications: What Are the Abstractions and Implementations?
This article presents an overview of applications of logic programming,
classifying them based on the abstractions and implementations of logic
languages that support the applications. The three key abstractions are join,
recursion, and constraint. Their essential implementations are for-loops, fixed
points, and backtracking, respectively. The corresponding kinds of applications
are database queries, inductive analysis, and combinatorial search,
respectively. We also discuss language extensions and programming paradigms,
summarize example application problems by application areas, and touch on
example systems that support variants of the abstractions with different
implementations
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