Improving Model Finding for Integrated Quantitative-qualitative Spatial Reasoning With First-order Logic Ontologies

Many spatial standards are developed to harmonize the semantics and specifications of GIS data and for sophisticated reasoning. All these standards include some types of simple and complex geometric features, and some of them incorporate simple mereotopological relations. But the relations as used in these standards, only allow the extraction of qualitative information from geometric data and lack formal semantics that link geometric representations with mereotopological or other qualitative relations. This impedes integrated reasoning over qualitative data obtained from geometric sources and “native” topological information – for example as provided from textual sources where precise locations or spatial extents are unknown or unknowable. To address this issue, the first contribution in this dissertation is a first-order logical ontology that treats geometric features (e.g. polylines, polygons) and relations between them as specializations of more general types of features (e.g. any kind of 2D or 1D features) and mereotopological relations between them. Key to this endeavor is the use of a multidimensional theory of space wherein, unlike traditional logical theories of mereotopology (like RCC), spatial entities of different dimensions can co-exist and be related. However terminating or tractable reasoning with such an expressive ontology and potentially large amounts of data is a challenging AI problem. Model finding tools used to verify FOL ontologies with data usually employ a SAT solver to determine the satisfiability of the propositional instantiations (SAT problems) of the ontology. These solvers often experience scalability issues with increasing number of objects and size and complexity of the ontology, limiting its use to ontologies with small signatures and building small models with less than 20 objects. To investigate how an ontology influences the size of its SAT translation and consequently the model finder’s performance, we develop a formalization of FOL ontologies with data. We theoretically identify parameters of an ontology that significantly contribute to the dramatic growth in size of the SAT problem. The search space of the SAT problem is exponential in the signature of the ontology (the number of predicates in the axiomatization and any additional predicates from skolemization) and the number of distinct objects in the model. Axiomatizations that contain many definitions lead to large number of SAT propositional clauses. This is from the conversion of biconditionals to clausal form. We therefore postulate that optional definitions are ideal sentences that can be eliminated from an ontology to boost model finder’s performance. We then formalize optional definition elimination (ODE) as an FOL ontology preprocessing step and test the simplification on a set of spatial benchmark problems to generate smaller SAT problems (with fewer clauses and variables) without changing the satisfiability and semantic meaning of the problem. We experimentally demonstrate that the reduction in SAT problem size also leads to improved model finding with state-of-the-art model finders, with speedups of 10-99%. Altogether, this dissertation improves spatial reasoning capabilities using FOL ontologies – in terms of a formal framework for integrated qualitative-geometric reasoning, and specific ontology preprocessing steps that can be built into automated reasoners to achieve better speedups in model finding times, and scalability with moderately-sized datasets

CHC-COMP 2022: Competition Report

CHC-COMP 2022 is the fifth edition of the competition of solvers for Constrained Horn Clauses. The competition was run in March 2022; the results were presented at the 9th Workshop on Horn Clauses for Verification and Synthesis held in Munich, Germany, on April 3, 2022. This edition featured six solvers, and eight tracks consisting of sets of linear and nonlinear clauses with constraints over linear integer arithmetic, linear real arithmetic, arrays, and algebraic data types. This report provides an overview of the organization behind the competition runs: it includes the technical details of the competition setup as well as presenting the results of the 2022 edition.Comment: In Proceedings HCVS/VPT 2022, arXiv:2211.10675. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.04635, arXiv:2008.02939 by other author

Goal Translation for a Hammer for Coq (Extended Abstract)

Hammers are tools that provide general purpose automation for formal proof assistants. Despite the gaining popularity of the more advanced versions of type theory, there are no hammers for such systems. We present an extension of the various hammer components to type theory: (i) a translation of a significant part of the Coq logic into the format of automated proof systems; (ii) a proof reconstruction mechanism based on a Ben-Yelles-type algorithm combined with limited rewriting, congruence closure and a first-order generalization of the left rules of Dyckhoff's system LJT.Comment: In Proceedings HaTT 2016, arXiv:1606.0542

Reachability analysis for AWS-based networks

Cloud services provide the ability to provision virtual networked infrastructure on demand over the Internet. The rapid growth of these virtually provisioned cloud networks has increased the demand for automated reasoning tools capable of identifying misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities. This type of automation gives customers the assurance they need to deploy sensitive workloads. It can also reduce the cost and time-to-market for regulated customers looking to establish compliance certification for cloud-based applications. In this industrial case-study, we describe a new network reachability reasoning tool, called Tiros, that uses off-the-shelf automated theorem proving tools to fill this need. Tiros is the foundation of a recently introduced network security analysis feature in the Amazon Inspector service now available to millions of customers building applications in the cloud. Tiros is also used within Amazon Web Services (AWS) to automate the checking of compliance certification and adherence to security invariants for many AWS services that build on existing AWS networking features

An Instantiation-Based Approach for Solving Quantified Linear Arithmetic

This paper presents a framework to derive instantiation-based decision procedures for satisfiability of quantified formulas in first-order theories, including its correctness, implementation, and evaluation. Using this framework we derive decision procedures for linear real arithmetic (LRA) and linear integer arithmetic (LIA) formulas with one quantifier alternation. Our procedure can be integrated into the solving architecture used by typical SMT solvers. Experimental results on standardized benchmarks from model checking, static analysis, and synthesis show that our implementation of the procedure in the SMT solver CVC4 outperforms existing tools for quantified linear arithmetic

Bayesian optimisation of solver parameters in CBMC

Satisfiability solvers can be embedded in applications to perform specific formal reasoning tasks. CBMC, for example, is a bounded model checker for C and C++ that embeds SMT and SAT solvers to check internally generated formulae. Such solvers will be solely used to evaluate the class of formulae generated by the embedding application and therefore may benefit from domain-specific parameter tuning. We propose the use of Bayesian optimisation for this purpose, which offers a principled approach to black-box optimisation within limited resources. We demonstrate its use for optimisation of the solver embedded in CBMC specifically for a collection of test harnesses in active industrial use, for which we have achieved a significant improvement over the default parameters