arXiv subjects

Alexandra Silva

Publications and source records attributed to Alexandra Silva.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Layer by layer - Combining Monads

We develop a method to incrementally construct programming languages. Our approach is categorical: each layer of the language is described as a monad. Our method either (i) concretely builds a distributive law between two monads, i.e. layers of the language, which then provides a monad structure to the composition of layers, or (ii) identifies precisely the algebraic obstacles to the existence of a distributive law and gives a best approximant language. The running example will involve three layers: a basic imperative language enriched first by adding non-determinism and then probabilistic choice. The first extension works seamlessly, but the second encounters an obstacle, which results in a best approximant language structurally very similar to the probabilistic network specification language ProbNetKAT.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2018

Convex Language Semantics for Nondeterministic Probabilistic Automata

We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that these automata are strictly more expressive than deterministic probabilistic automata, and we prove that the problem of checking language equivalence is undecidable by reduction from the threshold problem. However, we provide a discounted metric that can be computed to arbitrarily high precision.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2018

Almost Sure Productivity

We define Almost Sure Productivity (ASP), a probabilistic generalization of the productivity condition for coinductively defined structures. Intuitively, a probabilistic coinductive stream or tree is ASP if it produces infinitely many outputs with probability 1. Formally, we define almost sure productivity using a final coalgebra semantics of programs inspired from Kerstan and König. Then, we introduce a core language for probabilistic streams and trees, and provide two approaches to verify ASP: a sufficient syntactic criterion, and a reduction to model-checking pCTL* formulas on probabilistic pushdown automata. The reduction shows that ASP is decidable for our core language.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2018

Probabilistic Program Equivalence for NetKAT

We tackle the problem of deciding whether two probabilistic programs are equivalent in Probabilistic NetKAT, a formal language for specifying and reasoning about the behavior of packet-switched networks. We show that the problem is decidable for the history-free fragment of the language by developing an effective decision procedure based on stochastic matrices. The main challenge lies in reasoning about iteration, which we address by designing an encoding of the program semantics as a finite-state absorbing Markov chain, whose limiting distribution can be computed exactly. In an extended case study on a real-world data center network, we automatically verify various quantitative properties of interest, including resilience in the presence of failures, by analyzing the Markov chain semantics.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2018

Borel Kernels and their Approximation, Categorically

This paper introduces a categorical framework to study the exact and approximate semantics of probabilistic programs. We construct a dagger symmetric monoidal category of Borel kernels where the dagger-structure is given by Bayesian inversion. We show functorial bridges between this category and categories of Banach lattices which formalize the move from kernel-based semantics to predicate transformer (backward) or state transformer (forward) semantics. These bridges are related by natural transformations, and we show in particular that the Radon-Nikodym and Riesz representation theorems - two pillars of probability theory - define natural transformations. With the mathematical infrastructure in place, we present a generic and endogenous approach to approximating kernels on standard Borel spaces which exploits the involutive structure of our category of kernels. The approximation can be formulated in several equivalent ways by using the functorial bridges and natural transformations described above. Finally, we show that for sensible discretization schemes, every Borel kernel can be approximated by kernels on finite spaces, and that these approximations converge for a natural choice of topology. We illustrate the theory by showing two examples of how approximation can effectively be used in practice: Bayesian inference and the Kleene star operation of ProbNetKAT.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2018

Concurrent Kleene Algebra: Free Model and Completeness

Concurrent Kleene Algebra (CKA) was introduced by Hoare, Moeller, Struth and Wehrman in 2009 as a framework to reason about concurrent programs. We prove that the axioms for CKA with bounded parallelism are complete for the semantics proposed in the original paper; consequently, these semantics are the free model for this fragment. This result settles a conjecture of Hoare and collaborators. Moreover, the techniques developed along the way are reusable; in particular, they allow us to establish pomset automata as an operational model for CKA.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2018

Coinductive Foundations of Infinitary Rewriting and Infinitary Equational Logic

We present a coinductive framework for defining and reasoning about the infinitary analogues of equational logic and term rewriting in a uniform, coinductive way. The setup captures rewrite sequences of arbitrary ordinal length, but it has neither the need for ordinals nor for metric convergence. This makes the framework especially suitable for formalizations in theorem provers.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2017

Brzozowski Goes Concurrent - A Kleene Theorem for Pomset Languages

Concurrent Kleene Algebra (CKA) is a mathematical formalism to study programs that exhibit concurrent behaviour. As with previous extensions of Kleene Algebra, characterizing the free model is crucial in order to develop the foundations of the theory and potential applications. For CKA, this has been an open question for a few years and this paper makes an important step towards an answer. We present a new automaton model and a Kleene-like theorem that relates a relaxed version of CKA to series-parallel pomset languages, which are a natural candidate for the free model. There are two substantial differences with previous work: from expressions to automata, we use Brzozowski derivatives, which enable a direct construction of the automaton; from automata to expressions, we provide a syntactic characterization of the automata that denote valid CKA behaviours.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2017

CALF: Categorical Automata Learning Framework

Automata learning is a technique that has successfully been applied in verification, with the automaton type varying depending on the application domain. Adaptations of automata learning algorithms for increasingly complex types of automata have to be developed from scratch because there was no abstract theory offering guidelines. This makes it hard to devise such algorithms, and it obscures their correctness proofs. We introduce a simple category-theoretic formalism that provides an appropriately abstract foundation for studying automata learning. Furthermore, our framework establishes formal relations between algorithms for learning, testing, and minimization. We illustrate its generality with two examples: deterministic and weighted automata.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2017

Conditional Transition Systems with Upgrades

We introduce a variant of transition systems, where activation of transitions depends on conditions of the environment and upgrades during runtime potentially create additional transitions. Using a cornerstone result in lattice theory, we show that such transition systems can be modelled in two ways: as conditional transition systems (CTS) with a partial order on conditions, or as lattice transition systems (LaTS), where transitions are labelled with the elements from a distributive lattice. We define equivalent notions of bisimilarity for both variants and characterise them via a bisimulation game. We explain how conditional transition systems are related to featured transition systems for the modelling of software product lines. Furthermore, we show how to compute bisimilarity symbolically via BDDs by defining an operation on BDDs that approximates an element of a Boolean algebra into a lattice. We have implemented our procedure and provide runtime results.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2017

Sound and complete axiomatizations of coalgebraic language equivalence

Coalgebras provide a uniform framework to study dynamical systems, including several types of automata. In this paper, we make use of the coalgebraic view on systems to investigate, in a uniform way, under which conditions calculi that are sound and complete with respect to behavioral equivalence can be extended to a coarser coalgebraic language equivalence, which arises from a generalised powerset construction that determinises coalgebras. We show that soundness and completeness are established by proving that expressions modulo axioms of a calculus form the rational fixpoint of the given type functor. Our main result is that the rational fixpoint of the functor $FT$, where $T$ is a monad describing the branching of the systems (e.g. non-determinism, weights, probability etc.), has as a quotient the rational fixpoint of the "determinised" type functor $\bar F$, a lifting of $F$ to the category of $T$-algebras. We apply our framework to the concrete example of weighted automata, for which we present a new sound and complete calculus for weighted language equivalence. As a special case, we obtain non-deterministic automata, where we recover Rabinovich's sound and complete calculus for language equivalence.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2015

A Coinductive Framework for Infinitary Rewriting and Equational Reasoning (Extended Version)

We present a coinductive framework for defining infinitary analogues of equational reasoning and rewriting in a uniform way. We define the relation =^infty, notion of infinitary equational reasoning, and ->^infty, the standard notion of infinitary rewriting as follows: =^infty := nu R. ( <-_root + ->_root + lift(R) )^* ->^infty := mu R. nu S. ( ->_root + lift(R) )^* ; lift(S) where lift(R) := { (f(s_1,...,s_n), f(t_1,...,t_n)) | s_1 R t_1,...,s_n R t_n } + id , and where mu is the least fixed point operator and nu is the greatest fixed point operator. The setup captures rewrite sequences of arbitrary ordinal length, but it has neither the need for ordinals nor for metric convergence. This makes the framework especially suitable for formalizations in theorem provers.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2014

A Coinductive Treatment of Infinitary Rewriting

We introduce a coinductive definition of infinitary term rewriting. The setup is surprisingly simple, and has in contrast to the usual definitions of infinitary rewriting, neither need for ordinals nor for metric convergence. While the idea of a coinductive treatment of infinitary rewriting is not new, all previous approaches were limited to reductions of length at most omega. The approach presented in this paper is the first to capture the full infinitary term rewriting with reductions of arbitrary ordinal length. Apart from an elegant reformulation of known concepts, our approach gives rise, in a very natural way, to a novel notion of infinitary equational reasoning.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2014

How to Kill Epsilons with a Dagger -- A Coalgebraic Take on Systems with Algebraic Label Structure

We propose an abstract framework for modeling state-based systems with internal behavior as e.g. given by silent or $ε$-transitions. Our approach employs monads with a parametrized fixpoint operator $\dagger$ to give a semantics to those systems and implement a sound procedure of abstraction of the internal transitions, whose labels are seen as the unit of a free monoid. More broadly, our approach extends the standard coalgebraic framework for state-based systems by taking into account the algebraic structure of the labels of their transitions. This allows to consider a wide range of other examples, including Mazurkiewicz traces for concurrent systems.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2013

Automatic Equivalence Proofs for Non-deterministic Coalgebras

A notion of generalized regular expressions for a large class of systems modeled as coalgebras, and an analogue of Kleene's theorem and Kleene algebra, were recently proposed by a subset of the authors of this paper. Examples of the systems covered include infinite streams, deterministic automata, Mealy machines and labelled transition systems. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to decide whether two expressions are bisimilar or not. The procedure is implemented in the automatic theorem prover CIRC, by reducing coinduction to an entailment relation between an algebraic specification and an appropriate set of equations. We illustrate the generality of the tool with three examples: infinite streams of real numbers, Mealy machines and labelled transition systems.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2013

Generalizing determinization from automata to coalgebras

The powerset construction is a standard method for converting a nondeterministic automaton into a deterministic one recognizing the same language. In this paper, we lift the powerset construction from automata to the more general framework of coalgebras with structured state spaces. Coalgebra is an abstract framework for the uniform study of different kinds of dynamical systems. An endofunctor F determines both the type of systems (F-coalgebras) and a notion of behavioural equivalence (~_F) amongst them. Many types of transition systems and their equivalences can be captured by a functor F. For example, for deterministic automata the derived equivalence is language equivalence, while for non-deterministic automata it is ordinary bisimilarity. We give several examples of applications of our generalized determinization construction, including partial Mealy machines, (structured) Moore automata, Rabin probabilistic automata, and, somewhat surprisingly, even pushdown automata. To further witness the generality of the approach we show how to characterize coalgebraically several equivalences which have been object of interest in the concurrency community, such as failure or ready semantics.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2012

Proceedings Fifth Interaction and Concurrency Experience

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE'12, the 5th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop, which was held in Stockholm, Sweden on the 16th of June 2012 as a satellite event of DisCoTec'12. The topic of ICE'12 was Distributed Coordination, Execution Models, and Resilient Interaction. The ICE procedure for paper selection allows for PC members to interact, anonymously, with authors. During the review phase, each submitted paper is published on a Wiki and associated with a discussion forum whose access is restricted to the authors and to all the PC members not declaring a conflict of interests. The PC members post comments and questions that the authors reply to. Each paper was reviewed by four PC members, and altogether 8 papers were accepted for publication. We were proud to host two invited talks, Marcello Bonsangue and Ichiro Hasuo, whose abstracts are included in this volume together with the regular papers.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2011

Proceedings Fourth Interaction and Concurrency Experience

This volume contains the pre-proceedings of ICE'11, the 4th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop, which was held in Reykjavik, Iceland on the 9th of June 2011 as a satellite event of DisCoTec'11. The topic of ICE'11 was Reliable and Contract-based Interaction. Reliable interactions are, e.g., those enjoying suitable logical, behavioural, or security properties, or adhering to certain QoS standards. Contract-based interactions are, e.g., those where the interacting entities are committed to give certain guarantees whenever certain assumptions are met by their operating environment. The ICE procedure for paper selection allows for PC members to interact, anonymously, with authors. During the review phase, each submitted paper is published on a Wiki and associated with a discussion forum whose access is restricted to the authors and to all the PC members not declaring a conflict of interests. The PC members post comments and questions that the authors reply to. Each paper was reviewed by four PC members, and altogether 8 papers (out of 12) were accepted for publication. We were proud to host three invited talks by Rocco De Nicola (joint with PACO), Simon Gay and Prakash Panangaden, whose abstracts are included in this volume together with the regular papers.

cs.LO↗