8,508 research outputs found
Sciduction: Combining Induction, Deduction, and Structure for Verification and Synthesis
Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems
in system verification and synthesis remain challenging. Examples include the
verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on
timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from
specifications. The major challenges include environment modeling,
incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision
problems.
This position paper proposes sciduction, an approach to tackle these
challenges by integrating inductive inference, deductive reasoning, and
structure hypotheses. Deductive reasoning, which leads from general rules or
concepts to conclusions about specific problem instances, includes techniques
such as logical inference and constraint solving. Inductive inference, which
generalizes from specific instances to yield a concept, includes algorithmic
learning from examples. Structure hypotheses are used to define the class of
artifacts, such as invariants or program fragments, generated during
verification or synthesis. Sciduction constrains inductive and deductive
reasoning using structure hypotheses, and actively combines inductive and
deductive reasoning: for instance, deductive techniques generate examples for
learning, and inductive reasoning is used to guide the deductive engines.
We illustrate this approach with three applications: (i) timing analysis of
software; (ii) synthesis of loop-free programs, and (iii) controller synthesis
for hybrid systems. Some future applications are also discussed
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
A logic with temporally accessible iteration
Deficiency in expressive power of the first-order logic has led to developing
its numerous extensions by fixed point operators, such as Least Fixed-Point
(LFP), inflationary fixed-point (IFP), partial fixed-point (PFP), etc. These
logics have been extensively studied in finite model theory, database theory,
descriptive complexity. In this paper we introduce unifying framework, the
logic with iteration operator, in which iteration steps may be accessed by
temporal logic formulae. We show that proposed logic FO+TAI subsumes all
mentioned fixed point extensions as well as many other fixed point logics as
natural fragments. On the other hand we show that over finite structures FO+TAI
is no more expressive than FO+PFP. Further we show that adding the same
machinery to the logic of monotone inductions (FO+LFP) does not increase its
expressive power either
Complexity of short Presburger arithmetic
We study complexity of short sentences in Presburger arithmetic (Short-PA).
Here by "short" we mean sentences with a bounded number of variables,
quantifiers, inequalities and Boolean operations; the input consists only of
the integers involved in the inequalities. We prove that assuming Kannan's
partition can be found in polynomial time, the satisfiability of Short-PA
sentences can be decided in polynomial time. Furthermore, under the same
assumption, we show that the numbers of satisfying assignments of short
Presburger sentences can also be computed in polynomial time
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