159 research outputs found
Ranking and Repulsing Supermartingales for Reachability in Probabilistic Programs
Computing reachability probabilities is a fundamental problem in the analysis
of probabilistic programs. This paper aims at a comprehensive and comparative
account on various martingale-based methods for over- and under-approximating
reachability probabilities. Based on the existing works that stretch across
different communities (formal verification, control theory, etc.), we offer a
unifying account. In particular, we emphasize the role of order-theoretic fixed
points---a classic topic in computer science---in the analysis of probabilistic
programs. This leads us to two new martingale-based techniques, too. We give
rigorous proofs for their soundness and completeness. We also make an
experimental comparison using our implementation of template-based synthesis
algorithms for those martingales
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