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Editors contains: "Forster, Yannick"

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  1. Forster, Yannick; Keller, Chantal (Ed.)
    Implementability is the decision problem at the heart of top-down approaches to protocol verification. In this paper, we present a mechanization of a recently proposed precise implementability characterization by Li et al. for a large class of protocols that subsumes many existing formalisms in the literature. Our protocols and implementations model asynchronous commmunication, and can exhibit infinite behavior. We improve upon their pen-and-paper results by unifying distinct formalisms, simplifying existing proof arguments, elaborating on the construction of canonical implementations, and even uncovering a subtle bug in the semantics for infinite words. As a corollary of our mechanization, we show that the original characterization of implementability applies even to protocols with infinitely many participants. We also contribute a reusable library for reasoning about generic communicating state machines. Our mechanization consists of about 15k lines of Rocq code. We believe that our mechanization can provide the foundation for deductively proving the implementability of protocols beyond the reach of prior work, extracting certified implementations for finite protocols, and investigating implementability under alternative asynchronous communication models. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 22, 2026
  2. Forster, Yannick; Keller, Chantal (Ed.)
    {"Abstract":["Certain results involving "higher structures" are not currently accessible to computer formalization because the prerequisite ∞-category theory has not been formalized. To support future work on formalizing ∞-category theory in Lean’s mathematics library, we formalize some fundamental constructions involving the 1-category of categories. Specifically, we construct the left adjoint to the nerve embedding of categories into simplicial sets, defining the homotopy category functor. We prove further that this adjunction is reflective, which allows us to conclude that 𝒞at has colimits. To our knowledge this is the first formalized proof that the nerve functor is a fully faithful right adjoint and that the category of categories is cocomplete."]} 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 22, 2026
  3. Forster, Yannick; Keller, Chantal (Ed.)
    Algebraic data types (ADTs) and pattern matching are widely used to write elegant functional programs and to specify program behavior. These constructs are critical to most general-purpose interactive theorem provers (e.g. Lean, Rocq/Coq), first-order SMT-based deductive verifiers (e.g. Dafny, VeriFast), and intermediate verification languages (e.g. Why3). Such features require layers of compilation - in Rocq, pattern matches are compiled to remove nesting, while SMT-based tools further axiomatize ADTs with a first-order specification. However, these critical steps have been omitted from prior formalizations of such toolchains (e.g. MetaRocq). We give the first proved-sound sophisticated pattern matching compiler (based on Maranget’s compilation to decision trees) and first-order axiomatization of ADTs, both based on Why3 implementations. We prove the soundness of exhaustiveness checking, extending pen-and-paper proofs from the literature, and formulate a robustness property with which we find an exhaustiveness-related bug in Why3. We show that many of our proofs could be useful for reasoning about any first-order program verifier supporting ADTs. 
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