arXiv subjects

Florian Rabe

Publications and source records attributed to Florian Rabe.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Polymorphism Meets DHOL

DHOL is an extensional, classical logic that equips the well-known higher-order logic (HOL) with dependent types. This allows for concise encodings of important domains like size-bounded data structures, category theory, or proof theory. Automation support is obtained by translating DHOL to HOL, for which powerful modern automated theorem provers are available. However, a critically missing feature of DHOL is polymorphism. We develop the syntax and semantics of polymorphic DHOL and extend the translation accordingly. We implement the translation in the logic-embedding tool and evaluate it on a range of TPTP formalizations. The logic-embedding tool, together with an off-the-shelf HOL theorem prover easily creates a PDHOL theorem prover for experimenting.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Subtyping in DHOL -- Extended preprint

The recently introduced dependent typed higher-order logic (DHOL) offers an interesting compromise between expressiveness and automation support. It sacrifices the decidability of its type system in order to significantly extend its expressiveness over standard HOL. Yet it retains strong automated theorem proving support via a sound and complete translation to HOL. We leverage this design to extend DHOL with refinement and quotient types. Both of these are commonly requested by practitioners but rarely provided by automated theorem provers. This is because they inherently require undecidable typing and thus are very difficult to retrofit to decidable type systems. But with DHOL already doing the heavy lifting, adding them is not only possible but elegant and simple. Concretely, we add refinement and quotient types as special cases of subtyping. This turns the associated canonical inclusion resp. projection maps into identity maps and thus avoids costly changes in representation. We present the syntax, semantics, and translation to HOL for the extended language, including the proofs of soundness and completeness.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

The Dependently Typed Higher-Order Form for the TPTP World

Much of the current research and development in the field of automated reasoning builds on the infrastructure provided by the TPTP World. The TPTP language for logical formulae is central to the far-reaching adoption of the TPTP World. This paper introduces the Dependently Typed higher-order Form (DTF) of the TPTP language. It takes advantage of already established binders in the syntax, and is thus a minimally intrusive extension to the Typed Higher-order Form (THF). A starting set of over 100 problems is provided to exhibit the usefulness and incite interest in DTF. Some tools that are already able to reason about problems in the DTF language are discussed.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Formalizing Representation Theorems for a Logical Framework with Rewriting

Representation theorems for formal systems often take the form of an inductive translation that satisfies certain invariants, which are proved inductively. Theory morphisms and logical relations are common patterns of such inductive constructions. They allow representing the translation and the proofs of the invariants as a set of translation rules, corresponding to the cases of the inductions. Importantly, establishing the invariants is reduced to checking a finite set of, typically decidable, statements. Therefore, in a framework supporting theory morphisms and logical relations, translations that fit one of these patterns become much easier to formalize and to verify. The lambdaPi-calculus modulo rewriting is a logical framework designed for representing and translating between formal systems that has previously not systematically supported such patterns. In this paper, we extend it with theory morphisms and logical relations. We apply these to define and verify invariants for a number of translations between formal systems. In doing so, we identify some best practices that enable us to obtain elegant novel formalizations of some challenging translations, in particular sort-erasure translations from sorted to unsorted languages.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2024

The Potential of Answer Classes in Large-scale Written Computer-Science Exams -- Vol. 2

Students' answers to tasks provide a valuable source of information in teaching as they result from applying cognitive processes to a learning content addressed in the task. Due to steadily increasing course sizes, analyzing student answers is frequently the only means of obtaining evidence about student performance. However, in many cases, resources are limited, and when evaluating exams, the focus is solely on identifying correct or incorrect answers. This overlooks the value of analyzing incorrect answers, which can help improve teaching strategies or identify misconceptions to be addressed in the next cohort. In teacher training for secondary education, assessment guidelines are mandatory for every exam, including anticipated errors and misconceptions. We applied this concept to a university exam with 462 students and 41 tasks. For each task, the instructors developed answer classes -- classes of expected responses, to which student answers were mapped during the exam correction process. The experiment resulted in a shift in mindset among the tutors and instructors responsible for the course: after initially having great reservations about whether the significant additional effort would yield an appropriate benefit, the procedure was subsequently found to be extremely valuable. The concept presented, and the experience gained from the experiment were cast into a system with which it is possible to correct paper-based exams on the basis of answer classes. This updated version of the paper provides an overview and new potential in the course of using the digital version of the approach.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Proceedings Workshop on Logical Frameworks and Meta-Languages: Theory and Practice

Logical frameworks and meta-languages form a common substrate for representing, implementing and reasoning about a wide variety of deductive systems of interest in logic and computer science. Their design, implementation and their use in reasoning tasks, ranging from the correctness of software to the properties of formal systems, have been the focus of considerable research over the last three decades. The LFMTP workshop brought together designers, implementors and practitioners to discuss various aspects impinging on the structure and utility of logical frameworks, including the treatment of variable binding, inductive and co-inductive reasoning techniques and the expressiveness and lucidity of the reasoning process. The 2024 instance of LFMTP was organized by Florian Rabe and Claudio Sacerdoti Coen in Tallinn, Estonia, the 8th July, as a satellite event of the FSCD conference. The workshop received 8 submissions, of which 6 were presented at the workshop. Of these, 2 were work-in-progress presentations, and 4 were accepted for these formal proceedings. Additionally, Carsten Sch\"urmann of IT University of Copenhagen gave an invited talk on Nominal State Separating Proofs.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2023

Theorem Proving in Dependently-Typed Higher-Order Logic -- Extended Preprint

Higher-order logic HOL offers a very simple syntax and semantics for representing and reasoning about typed data structures. But its type system lacks advanced features where types may depend on terms. Dependent type theory offers such a rich type system, but has rather substantial conceptual differences to HOL, as well as comparatively poor proof automation support. We introduce a dependently-typed extension DHOL of HOL that retains the style and conceptual framework of HOL. Moreover, we build a translation from DHOL to HOL and implement it as a preprocessor to a HOL theorem prover, thereby obtaining a theorem prover for DHOL.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2021

Systematic Translation of Formalizations of Type Theory from Intrinsic to Extrinsic Style

Type theories can be formalized using the intrinsically (hard) or the extrinsically (soft) typed style. In large libraries of type theoretical features, often both styles are present, which can lead to code duplication and integration issues. We define an operator that systematically translates a hard-typed into the corresponding soft-typed formulation. Even though this translation is known in principle, a number of subtleties make it more difficult than naively expected. Importantly, our translation preserves modularity, i.e., it maps structured sets of hard-typed features to correspondingly structured soft-typed ones. We implement our operator in the MMT system and apply it to a library of type-theoretical features.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

A Survey of Languages for Formalizing Mathematics

In order to work with mathematical content in computer systems, it is necessary to represent it in formal languages. Ideally, these are supported by tools that verify the correctness of the content, allow computing with it, and produce human-readable documents. These goals are challenging to combine and state-of-the-art tools typically have to make difficult compromises. In this paper we discuss languages that have been created for this purpose, including logical languages of proof assistants and other formal systems, semi-formal languages, intermediate languages for exchanging mathematical knowledge, and language frameworks that allow building customized languages. We evaluate their advantages based on our experience in designing and applying languages and tools for formalizing mathematics. We reach the conclusion that no existing language is truly good enough yet and derive ideas for possible future improvements.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

Experiences from Exporting Major Proof Assistant Libraries

The interoperability of proof assistants and the integration of their libraries is a highly valued but elusive goal in the field of theorem proving. As a preparatory step, in previous work, we translated the libraries of multiple proof assistants, specifically the ones of Coq, HOL Light, IMPS, Isabelle, Mizar, and PVS into a universal format: OMDoc/MMT. Each translation presented tremendous theoretical, technical, and social challenges, some universal and some system-specific, some solvable and some still open. In this paper, we survey these challenges and compare and evaluate the solutions we chose. We believe similar library translations will be an essential part of any future system interoperability solution and our experiences will prove valuable to others undertaking such efforts.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

Making Isabelle Content Accessible in Knowledge Representation Formats

The libraries of proof assistants like Isabelle, Coq, HOL are notoriously difficult to interpret by external tools: de facto, only the prover itself can parse and process them adequately. In the case of Isabelle, an export of the library into a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) knowledge exchange format was already envisioned by the authors in 1999 but had previously proved too difficult. After substantial improvements of the Isabelle Prover IDE (PIDE) and the OMDoc/Mmt format since then, we are now able to deliver such an export. Concretely we present an integration of PIDE and MMT that allows exporting all Isabelle libraries in OMDoc format. Our export covers the full Isabelle distribution and the Archive of Formal Proofs (AFP) -- more than 12 thousand theories and locales resulting in over 65GB of OMDoc/XML. Such a systematic export of Isabelle content to a well-defined interchange format like OMDoc enables many applications such as dependency management, independent proof checking, or library search.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

TGView3D System Description: 3-Dimensional Visualization of Theory Graphs

We describe TGView3D, an interactive 3D graph viewer optimized for exploring theory graphs. To exploit the three spatial dimensions, it extends a force-directed layout with a hierarchical component. Because of the limitations of regular displays, the system also supports the use of a head-mounted display and utilizes several virtual realty interaction concepts.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

The Space of Mathematical Software Systems -- A Survey of Paradigmatic Systems

Mathematical software systems are becoming more and more important in pure and applied mathematics in order to deal with the complexity and scalability issues inherent in mathematics. In the last decades we have seen a cambric explosion of increasingly powerful but also diverging systems. To give researchers a guide to this space of systems, we devise a novel conceptualization of mathematical software that focuses on five aspects: inference covers formal logic and reasoning about mathematical statements via proofs and models, typically with strong emphasis on correctness; computation covers algorithms and software libraries for representing and manipulating mathematical objects, typically with strong emphasis on efficiency; concretization covers generating and maintaining collections of mathematical objects conforming to a certain pattern, typically with strong emphasis on complete enumeration; narration covers describing mathematical contexts and relations, typically with strong emphasis on human readability; finally, organization covers representing mathematical contexts and objects in machine-actionable formal languages, typically with strong emphasis on expressivity and system interoperability. Despite broad agreement that an ideal system would seamlessly integrate all these aspects, research has diversified into families of highly specialized systems focusing on a single aspect and possibly partially integrating others, each with their own communities, challenges, and successes. In this survey, we focus on the commonalities and differences of these systems from the perspective of a future multi-aspect system.

cs.MS↗

arXiv2019

Rapid Prototyping Formal Systems in MMT: 5 Case Studies

Logical frameworks are meta-formalisms in which the syntax and semantics of object logics and related formal systems can be defined. This allows object logics to inherit implementations from the framework including, e.g., parser, type checker, or module system. But if the desired object logic falls outside the comfort zone of the logical framework, these definitions may become cumbersome or infeasible. Therefore, the MMT system abstracts even further than previous frameworks: it assumes no type system or logic at all and allows its kernel algorithms to be customized by almost arbitrary sets of rules. In particular, this allows implementing standard logical frameworks like LF in MMT. But it does so without chaining users to one particular meta-formalism: users can flexibly adapt MMT whenever the object logic demands it. In this paper, we present a series of case studies that do just that, defining increasingly complex object logics in MMT. We use elegant declarative logic definitions wherever possible, but inject entirely new rules into the kernel when necessary. Our experience shows that the MMT approach allows deriving prototype implementations of very diverse formal systems very easily and quickly.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2019

Big Math and the One-Brain Barrier A Position Paper and Architecture Proposal

Over the last decades, a class of important mathematical results have required an ever increasing amount of human effort to carry out. For some, the help of computers is now indispensable. We analyze the implications of this trend towards "big mathematics", its relation to human cognition, and how machine support for big math can be organized. The central contribution of this position paper is an information model for "doing mathematics", which posits that humans very efficiently integrate four aspects: inference, computation, tabulation, and narration around a well-organized core of mathematical knowledge. The challenge for mathematical software systems is that these four aspects need to be integrated as well. We briefly survey the state of the art.

cs.MS↗

arXiv2017

Alignment-based Translations Across Formal Systems Using Interface Theories

Translating expressions between different logics and theorem provers is notoriously and often prohibitively difficult, due to the large differences between the logical foundations, the implementations of the systems, and the structure of the respective libraries. Practical solutions for exchanging theorems across theorem provers have remained both weak and brittle. Consequently, libraries are not easily reusable across systems, and substantial effort must be spent on reformalizing and proving basic results in each system. Notably, this problem exists already if we only try to exchange theorem statements and forgo exchanging proofs. In previous work we introduced alignments as a lightweight standard for relating concepts across libraries and conjectured that it would provide a good base for translating expressions. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. We use a foundationally uncommitted framework to write interface theories that abstract from logical foundation, implementation, and library structure. Then we use alignments to record how the concepts in the interface theories are realized in several major proof assistant libraries, and we use that information to translate expressions across libraries. Concretely, we present exemplary interface theories for several areas of mathematics and - in total - several hundred alignments that were found manually.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2017

Canonical Selection of Colimits

Colimits are a powerful tool for the combination of objects in a category. In the context of modeling and specification, they are used in the institution-independent semantics (1) of instantiations of parameterised specifications (e.g. in the specification language CASL), and (2) of combinations of networks of specifications (in the OMG standardised language DOL).

cs.LO↗

arXiv2014

A Logic-Independent IDE

The author's MMT system provides a framework for defining and implementing logical systems. By combining MMT with the jEdit text editor, we obtain a logic-independent IDE. The IDE functionality includes advanced features such as context-sensitive auto-completion, search, and change management.

cs.LO↗