4,074 research outputs found
Explaining Engineered Computing Systems’ Behaviour: the Role of Abstraction and Idealization
This paper addresses the methodological problem of analysing what it is to explain observed behaviours of engineered computing systems (BECS), focusing on the crucial role that abstraction and idealization play in explanations of both correct and incorrect BECS. First, it is argued that an understanding of explanatory requests about observed miscomputations crucially involves reference to the rich background afforded by hierarchies of functional specifications. Second, many explanations concerning incorrect BECS are found to abstract away (and profitably so on account of both relevance and intelligibility of the explanans) from descriptions of physical components and processes of computing systems that one finds below the logic circuit and gate layer of functional specification hierarchies. Third, model-based explanations of both correct and incorrect BECS that are provided in the framework of formal verification methods often involve idealizations. Moreover, a distinction between restrictive and permissive idealizations is introduced and their roles in BECS explanations are analysed
Integrating Abstraction Techniques for Formal Verification of Analog Designs
The verification of analog designs is a challenging and exhaustive task that requires deep understanding of physical
behaviours. In this paper, we propose a qualitative based predicate abstraction method for the verification of a class
of non-linear analog circuits. In the proposed method, system equations are automatically extracted from a circuit
diagram by means of a bond graph. Verification is applied based on combining techniques from constraint solving and
computer algebra along with symbolic model checking. Our methodology has the advantage of avoiding exhaustive
simulation normally encountered in the verification of analog designs. To this end, we have used Dymola, Hsolver,
SMV and Mathematica to implement the verification flow. We illustrate the methodology on several analog examples
including Colpitts and tunnel diode oscillators
Leveraging Datapath Propagation in IC3 for Hardware Model Checking
IC3 is a famous bit-level framework for safety verification. By incorporating
datapath abstraction, a notable enhancement in the efficiency of hardware
verification can be achieved. However, datapath abstraction entails a coarse
level of abstraction where all datapath operations are approximated as
uninterpreted functions. This level of abstraction, albeit useful, can lead to
an increased computational burden during the verification process as it
necessitates extensive exploration of redundant abstract state space.
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called datapath propagation. Our
method involves leveraging concrete constant values to iteratively compute the
outcomes of relevant datapath operations and their associated uninterpreted
functions. Meanwhile, we generate potentially useful datapath propagation
lemmas in abstract state space and tighten the datapath abstraction. With this
technique, the abstract state space can be reduced, and the verification
efficiency is significantly improved. We implemented the proposed approach and
conducted extensive experiments. The results show promising improvements of our
approach compared to the state-of-the-art verifiers
HeTM: Transactional Memory for Heterogeneous Systems
Modern heterogeneous computing architectures, which couple multi-core CPUs
with discrete many-core GPUs (or other specialized hardware accelerators),
enable unprecedented peak performance and energy efficiency levels.
Unfortunately, though, developing applications that can take full advantage of
the potential of heterogeneous systems is a notoriously hard task. This work
takes a step towards reducing the complexity of programming heterogeneous
systems by introducing the abstraction of Heterogeneous Transactional Memory
(HeTM). HeTM provides programmers with the illusion of a single memory region,
shared among the CPUs and the (discrete) GPU(s) of a heterogeneous system, with
support for atomic transactions. Besides introducing the abstract semantics and
programming model of HeTM, we present the design and evaluation of a concrete
implementation of the proposed abstraction, which we named Speculative HeTM
(SHeTM). SHeTM makes use of a novel design that leverages on speculative
techniques and aims at hiding the inherently large communication latency
between CPUs and discrete GPUs and at minimizing inter-device synchronization
overhead. SHeTM is based on a modular and extensible design that allows for
easily integrating alternative TM implementations on the CPU's and GPU's sides,
which allows the flexibility to adopt, on either side, the TM implementation
(e.g., in hardware or software) that best fits the applications' workload and
the architectural characteristics of the processing unit. We demonstrate the
efficiency of the SHeTM via an extensive quantitative study based both on
synthetic benchmarks and on a porting of a popular object caching system.Comment: The current work was accepted in the 28th International Conference on
Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT'19
LNCS
Reachability analysis is difficult for hybrid automata with affine differential equations, because the reach set needs to be approximated. Promising abstraction techniques usually employ interval methods or template polyhedra. Interval methods account for dense time and guarantee soundness, and there are interval-based tools that overapproximate affine flowpipes. But interval methods impose bounded and rigid shapes, which make refinement expensive and fixpoint detection difficult. Template polyhedra, on the other hand, can be adapted flexibly and can be unbounded, but sound template refinement for unbounded reachability analysis has been implemented only for systems with piecewise constant dynamics. We capitalize on the advantages of both techniques, combining interval arithmetic and template polyhedra, using the former to abstract time and the latter to abstract space. During a CEGAR loop, whenever a spurious error trajectory is found, we compute additional space constraints and split time intervals, and use these space-time interpolants to eliminate the counterexample. Space-time interpolation offers a lazy, flexible framework for increasing precision while guaranteeing soundness, both for error avoidance and fixpoint detection. To the best of out knowledge, this is the first abstraction refinement scheme for the reachability analysis over unbounded and dense time of affine hybrid systems, which is both sound and automatic. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with several benchmark examples, which cannot be handled by other tools
Neural Task Programming: Learning to Generalize Across Hierarchical Tasks
In this work, we propose a novel robot learning framework called Neural Task
Programming (NTP), which bridges the idea of few-shot learning from
demonstration and neural program induction. NTP takes as input a task
specification (e.g., video demonstration of a task) and recursively decomposes
it into finer sub-task specifications. These specifications are fed to a
hierarchical neural program, where bottom-level programs are callable
subroutines that interact with the environment. We validate our method in three
robot manipulation tasks. NTP achieves strong generalization across sequential
tasks that exhibit hierarchal and compositional structures. The experimental
results show that NTP learns to generalize well to- wards unseen tasks with
increasing lengths, variable topologies, and changing objectives.Comment: ICRA 201
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