skip to main content


Search for: All records

Award ID contains: 1739629

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Agarwal, Alekh ; Belgrave, Danielle ; Cho, Kyunghyun ; Oh, Alice (Ed.)
    We propose a new approach to automated theorem proving where an AlphaZero-style agent is self-training to refine a generic high-level expert strategy expressed as a nondeterministic program. An analogous teacher agent is self-training to generate tasks of suitable relevance and difficulty for the learner. This allows leveraging minimal amounts of domain knowledge to tackle problems for which training data is unavailable or hard to synthesize. As a specific illustration, we consider loop invariant synthesis for imperative programs and use neural networks to refine both the teacher and solver strategies. 
    more » « less
  2. Blanchette, Jasmin ; Kovacs, Laura ; Pattinson, Dirk (Ed.)
    Definition packages in theorem provers provide users with means of defining and organizing concepts of interest. This system description presents a new definition package for the hybrid systems theorem prover KeYmaera X based on differential dynamic logic (dL). The package adds KeYmaera X support for user-defined smooth functions whose graphs can be implicitly characterized by dL formulas. Notably, this makes it possible to implicitly characterize functions, such as the exponential and trigonometric functions, as solutions of differential equations and then prove properties of those functions using dL's differential equation reasoning principles. Trustworthiness of the package is achieved by minimally extending KeYmaera X's soundness-critical kernel with a single axiom scheme that expands function occurrences with their implicit characterization. Users are provided with a high-level interface for defining functions and non-soundness-critical tactics that automate low-level reasoning over implicit characterizations in hybrid system proofs. 
    more » « less
  3. Bartocci, Ezio ; Putot, Sylvie (Ed.)
    Switched systems are known to exhibit subtle (in)stability behaviors requiring system designers to carefully analyze the stability of closed-loop systems that arise from their proposed switching control laws. This paper presents a formal approach for verifying switched system stability that blends classical ideas from the controls and verification literature using differential dynamic logic (dL), a logic for deductive verification of hybrid systems. From controls, we use standard stability notions for various classes of switching mechanisms and their corresponding Lyapunov function-based analysis techniques. From verification, we use dL's ability to verify quantified properties of hybrid systems and dL models of switched systems as looping hybrid programs whose stability can be formally specified and proven by finding appropriate loop invariants, i.e., properties that are preserved across each loop iteration. This blend of ideas enables a trustworthy implementation of switched system stability verification in the KeYmaera X prover based on dL. For standard classes of switching mechanisms, the implementation provides fully automated stability proofs, including searching for suitable Lyapunov functions. Moreover, the generality of the deductive approach also enables verification of switching control laws that require non-standard stability arguments through the design of loop invariants that suitably express specific intuitions behind those control laws. This flexibility is demonstrated on three case studies: a model for longitudinal flight control by Branicky, an automatic cruise controller, and Brockett's nonholonomic integrator. 
    more » « less
  4. Huisman, Marieke ; Pasareanu, Corina ; Zhan, Naijun (Ed.)
    This paper presents a formally verified quantifier elimination (QE) algorithm for first-order real arithmetic by linear and quadratic virtual substitution (VS) in Isabelle/HOL. The Tarski-Seidenberg theorem established that the first-order logic of real arithmetic is decidable by QE. However, in practice, QE algorithms are highly complicated and often combine multiple methods for performance. VS is a practically successful method for QE that targets formulas with low-degree polynomials. To our knowledge, this is the first work to formalize VS for quadratic real arithmetic including inequalities. The proofs necessitate various contributions to the existing multivariate polynomial libraries in Isabelle/HOL. Our framework is modularized and easily expandable (to facilitate integrating future optimizations), and could serve as a basis for developing practical general-purpose QE algorithms. Further, as our formalization is designed with practicality in mind, we export our development to SML and test the resulting code on 378 benchmarks from the literature, comparing to Redlog, Z3, Wolfram Engine, and SMT-RAT. This identified inconsistencies in some tools, underscoring the significance of a verified approach for the intricacies of real arithmetic. 
    more » « less
  5. Cohen, Liron ; Kaliszyk, Cezary (Ed.)
    We formalize the univariate fragment of Ben-Or, Kozen, and Reif’s (BKR) decision procedure for first-order real arithmetic in Isabelle/HOL. BKR’s algorithm has good potential for parallelism and was designed to be used in practice. Its key insight is a clever recursive procedure that computes the set of all consistent sign assignments for an input set of univariate polynomials while carefully managing intermediate steps to avoid exponential blowup from naively enumerating all possible sign assignments (this insight is fundamental for both the univariate case and the general case). Our proof combines ideas from BKR and a follow-up work by Renegar that are well-suited for formalization. The resulting proof outline allows us to build substantially on Isabelle/HOL’s libraries for algebra, analysis, and matrices. Our main extensions to existing libraries are also detailed. 
    more » « less
  6. null (Ed.)
    Continuous invariants are an important component in deductive verification of hybrid and continuous systems. Just like discrete invariants are used to reason about correctness in discrete systems without having to unroll their loops, continuous invariants are used to reason about differential equations without having to solve them. Automatic generation of continuous invariants remains one of the biggest practical challenges to the automation of formal proofs of safety for hybrid systems. There are at present many disparate methods available for generating continuous invariants; however, this wealth of diverse techniques presents a number of challenges, with different methods having different strengths and weaknesses. To address some of these challenges, we develop Pegasus : an automatic continuous invariant generator which allows for combinations of various methods, and integrate it with the KeYmaera X theorem prover for hybrid systems. We describe some of the architectural aspects of this integration, comment on its methods and challenges, and present an experimental evaluation on a suite of benchmarks. 
    more » « less
  7. Continuous invariants are an important ingredient for deductive verification of hybrid and continuous systems. Just like discrete invariants are used to reason about correctness in discrete systems without unrolling their loops forever, continuous invariants are used to reason about differential equations without having to solve them. Automatic generation of continuous invariants remains one of the biggest practical challenges for automating formal proofs of safety for hybrid systems. There are at present many disparate methods available for generating continuous invariants; however, this wealth of diverse techniques presents a number of challenges, with different methods having different strengths and weaknesses. To address some of these challenges, we develop Pegasus: an automatic continuous invariant generator which allows for combinations of various methods, and integrate it with the KeYmaera X theorem prover for hybrid systems. We describe some of the architectural aspects of this integration, comment on its methods and challenges, and present an experimental evaluation on a suite of benchmarks. 
    more » « less
  8. Vector Lyapunov functions are a multi-dimensional extension of the more familiar (scalar) Lyapunov functions, commonly used to prove stability properties in systems described by non-linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). This paper explores an analogous vector extension for so-called barrier certificates used in safety verification. As with vector Lyapunov functions, the approach hinges on constructing appropriate comparison systems, i.e., related differential equation systems from which properties of the original system may be inferred. The paper presents an accessible development of the approach, demonstrates that most previous notions of barrier certificate are special cases of comparison systems, and discusses the potential applications of vector barrier certificates in safety verification and invariant synthesis. 
    more » « less