Deduction modulo theory

This paper is a survey on Deduction modulo theor

New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures

Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite. Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page

Tableaux Modulo Theories Using Superdeduction

We propose a method that allows us to develop tableaux modulo theories using the principles of superdeduction, among which the theory is used to enrich the deduction system with new deduction rules. This method is presented in the framework of the Zenon automated theorem prover, and is applied to the set theory of the B method. This allows us to provide another prover to Atelier B, which can be used to verify B proof rules in particular. We also propose some benchmarks, in which this prover is able to automatically verify a part of the rules coming from the database maintained by Siemens IC-MOL. Finally, we describe another extension of Zenon with superdeduction, which is able to deal with any first order theory, and provide a benchmark coming from the TPTP library, which contains a large set of first order problems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1501.0117

Decreasing Diagrams for Confluence and Commutation

Like termination, confluence is a central property of rewrite systems. Unlike for termination, however, there exists no known complexity hierarchy for confluence. In this paper we investigate whether the decreasing diagrams technique can be used to obtain such a hierarchy. The decreasing diagrams technique is one of the strongest and most versatile methods for proving confluence of abstract rewrite systems. It is complete for countable systems, and it has many well-known confluence criteria as corollaries. So what makes decreasing diagrams so powerful? In contrast to other confluence techniques, decreasing diagrams employ a labelling of the steps with labels from a well-founded order in order to conclude confluence of the underlying unlabelled relation. Hence it is natural to ask how the size of the label set influences the strength of the technique. In particular, what class of abstract rewrite systems can be proven confluent using decreasing diagrams restricted to 1 label, 2 labels, 3 labels, and so on? Surprisingly, we find that two labels suffice for proving confluence for every abstract rewrite system having the cofinality property, thus in particular for every confluent, countable system. Secondly, we show that this result stands in sharp contrast to the situation for commutation of rewrite relations, where the hierarchy does not collapse. Thirdly, investigating the possibility of a confluence hierarchy, we determine the first-order (non-)definability of the notion of confluence and related properties, using techniques from finite model theory. We find that in particular Hanf's theorem is fruitful for elegant proofs of undefinability of properties of abstract rewrite systems

Checking Zenon Modulo Proofs in Dedukti

Dedukti has been proposed as a universal proof checker. It is a logical framework based on the lambda Pi calculus modulo that is used as a backend to verify proofs coming from theorem provers, especially those implementing some form of rewriting. We present a shallow embedding into Dedukti of proofs produced by Zenon Modulo, an extension of the tableau-based first-order theorem prover Zenon to deduction modulo and typing. Zenon Modulo is applied to the verification of programs in both academic and industrial projects. The purpose of our embedding is to increase the confidence in automatically generated proofs by separating untrusted proof search from trusted proof verification.Comment: In Proceedings PxTP 2015, arXiv:1507.0837

Proving Looping and Non-Looping Non-Termination by Finite Automata

A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by representing the language by a tree automaton with a fixed number of states, and expressing the mentioned requirements in a SAT formula. Satisfiability of this formula implies non-termination. Our approach succeeds for many examples where all earlier techniques fail, for instance for the S-rule from combinatory logic