arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jürgen Giesl.
KoAT is a tool to automatically infer complexity bounds and prove termination of (possibly recursive) integer programs. To this end, KoAT implements an alternating modular inference of upper runtime and size bounds for program parts. In particular, KoAT uses a portfolio of different techniques to analyze subprograms. The power of our approach is demonstrated by an extensive experimental evaluation.
We show that existing tools for termination analysis are extremely well suited for LTL model checking of infinite state systems. To this end, we present a framework MoAT which uses the well-known automata-based approach and reduces the LTL model checking problem to fair termination. To prove or disprove fair termination, it then calls the termination tools KoAT and LoAT in the backend. Our experiments show that in this way, MoAT is on par with existing state-of-the-art tools for LTL model checking of infinite state systems.
In recent years, numerous techniques were developed to automatically prove termination of different kinds of probabilistic programs. However, there are only few automated methods to disprove their termination. In this paper, we present the first techniques to automatically disprove (positive) almost-sure termination of probabilistic term rewrite systems. Disproving termination of non-probabilistic systems requires finding a finite representation of an infinite computation, e.g., a loop of the rewrite system. We extend such qualitative techniques to probabilistic term rewriting, where a quantitative analysis is required. In addition to the existence of a loop, we have to count the number of such loops in order to embed suitable random walks into a computation, thereby disproving termination. To evaluate their power, we implemented all our techniques in the tool AProVE.
We propose a novel acceleration technique for loops operating on arrays. The goal of acceleration is to characterize the transitive closure of loops in a logic which is suitable for automated reasoning. Using the new notion of inductive lvalues, our technique can handle loops where previous techniques fail, and it unifies acceleration for arrays and scalar variables by regarding scalars as arrays of dimension 0. Moreover, our approach uses λs instead of quantifiers. Then the resulting SMT problems can be solved via lemmas on demand. An empirical evaluation of our implementation in the tool LoAT shows the power of our approach.
We propose a new approach for proving safety of infinite state systems. It extends the analyzed system by transitive relations until its diameter D becomes finite, i.e., until constantly many steps suffice to cover all reachable states, irrespective of the initial state. Then we can prove safety by checking that no error state is reachable in D steps. To deduce transitive relations, we use recurrence analysis. While recurrence analyses can usually find conjunctive relations only, our approach also discovers disjunctive relations by combining recurrence analysis with projections. An empirical evaluation of the implementation of our approach in our tool LoAT shows that it is highly competitive with the state of the art.
We consider linear single-path loops of the form \[ \textbf{while} \quad φ\quad \textbf{do} \quad \vec{x} \gets A \vec{x} + \vec{b} \quad \textbf{end} \] where $\vec{x}$ is a vector of variables, the loop guard $φ$ is a conjunction of linear inequations over the variables $\vec{x}$, and the update of the loop is represented by the matrix $A$ and the vector $\vec{b}$. It is already known that termination of such loops is decidable. In this work, we consider loops where $A$ has real eigenvalues, and prove that it is decidable whether the loop's runtime (for all inputs) is bounded by a constant if the variables range over $\mathbb R$ or $\mathbb Q$. This is an important problem in automatic program verification, since safety of linear while-programs is decidable if all loops have constant runtime, and it is closely connected to the existence of multiphase-linear ranking functions, which are often used for termination and complexity analysis. To evaluate its practical applicability, we also present an implementation of our decision procedure.
In earlier work, we developed a modular approach for automatic complexity analysis of integer programs. However, these integer programs do not allow non-tail recursive calls or subprocedures. In this paper, we consider integer programs with function calls and present a natural extension of our modular complexity analysis approach to the recursive setting based on a new form of ranking functions. Hence, our approach combines already existing powerful techniques on the "imperative" parts of the program and our novel ranking functions on the recursive parts. The strength of this combination is demonstrated by our implementation in the complexity analysis tool KoAT.
There are many evaluation strategies for term rewrite systems, but automatically proving termination or analyzing complexity is usually easiest for innermost rewriting. Several syntactic criteria exist when innermost termination implies (full) termination or when runtime complexity and innermost runtime complexity coincide. We adapt these criteria to the probabilistic setting, e.g., we show when it suffices to analyze almost-sure termination w.r.t. innermost rewriting in order to prove (full) almost-sure termination of probabilistic term rewrite systems. These criteria can be applied for both termination and complexity analysis in the probabilistic setting. We implemented and evaluated our new contributions in the tool AProVE. Moreover, we also use our new results to investigate the modularity of probabilistic termination properties.
The dependency pair (DP) framework is one of the most powerful techniques for automatic termination and complexity analysis of term rewrite systems. While DPs were extended to prove almost-sure termination of probabilistic term rewrite systems (PTRSs), automatic complexity analysis for PTRSs is largely unexplored. We introduce the first DP framework for analyzing expected complexity and for proving positive or strong almost-sure termination (SAST) of innermost rewriting with PTRSs, i.e., finite expected runtime. We implemented our framework in the tool AProVE and demonstrate its power compared to existing techniques for proving SAST.
Motivated by an application where we try to make proofs for Description Logic inferences smaller by rewriting, we consider the following decision problem, which we call the small term reachability problem: given a term rewriting system $R$, a term $s$, and a natural number $n$, decide whether there is a term $t$ of size $\leq n$ reachable from $s$ using the rules of $R$. We investigate the complexity of this problem depending on how termination of $R$ can be established. We show that the problem is in general NP-complete for length-reducing term rewriting systems. Its complexity increases to N2ExpTime-complete (NExpTime-complete) if termination is proved using a (linear) polynomial order and to PSpace-complete for systems whose termination can be shown using a restricted class of Knuth-Bendix orders. Confluence reduces the complexity to P for the length-reducing case, but has no effect on the worst-case complexity in the other two cases. Finally, we consider the large term reachability problem, a variant of the problem where we are interested in reachability of a term of size $\geq n$. It turns out that this seemingly innocuous modification in some cases changes the complexity of the problem, which may also become dependent on whether the number $n$ is is represented in unary or binary encoding, whereas this makes no difference for the complexity of the small term reachability problem.
SMT solvers use sophisticated techniques for polynomial (linear or non-linear) integer arithmetic. In contrast, non-polynomial integer arithmetic has mostly been neglected so far. However, in the context of program verification, polynomials are often insufficient to capture the behavior of the analyzed system without resorting to approximations. In the last years, incremental linearization has been applied successfully to satisfiability modulo real arithmetic with transcendental functions. We adapt this approach to an extension of polynomial integer arithmetic with exponential functions. Here, the key challenge is to compute suitable lemmas that eliminate the current model from the search space if it violates the semantics of exponentiation. An empirical evaluation of our implementation shows that our approach is highly effective in practice.
There exist several approaches to infer runtime or resource bounds for integer programs automatically. In this paper, we study the subclass of periodic rational solvable loops (prs-loops), where questions regarding the runtime and the size of variable values are decidable and where we can therefore obtain techniques that are complete for such subclasses. We show how to use these results for the complexity analysis of arbitrary general integer programs. To this end, we present a modular approach which computes local runtime and size bounds for subprograms which correspond to prs-loops. These local bounds are then lifted to global runtime and size bounds for the whole integer program. Furthermore, we introduce several techniques to transform larger programs into prs-loops to increase the scope of the approach. The power of the procedure is shown by our implementation in the complexity analysis tool KoAT.
We show that universal positive almost sure termination (UPAST) is decidable for a class of simple randomized programs, i.e., it is decidable whether the expected runtime of such a program is finite for all inputs. Our class contains all programs that consist of a single loop, with a linear loop guard and a loop body composed of two linear commuting and diagonalizable updates. In each iteration of the loop, the update to be carried out is picked at random, according to a fixed probability. We show the decidability of UPAST for this class of programs, where the program's variables and inputs may range over various sub-semirings of the real numbers. In this way, we extend a line of research initiated by Tiwari in 2004 into the realm of randomized programs.
Termination analysis of C programs is a challenging task. On the one hand, the analysis needs to be precise enough to draw meaningful conclusions. On the other hand, relevant programs in practice are large and require substantial abstraction. It is this inherent trade-off that is the crux of the problem. In this work, we present AProVE, a tool that uses symbolic execution to analyze termination of memory-manipulating C programs. While traditionally, AProVE's focus was on the preciseness of the analysis, we describe how we adapted our approach towards a modular analysis. Due to this adaption, our approach can now also handle recursive programs. Moreover, we present further performance improvements which we developed to make AProVE scale to large programs.
Dependency pairs are one of the most powerful techniques to analyze termination of term rewrite systems automatically. We adapt dependency pairs to the probabilistic setting and develop an annotated dependency pair framework for automatically proving almost-sure termination of probabilistic term rewrite systems, both for full and innermost rewriting. To evaluate its power, we implemented our framework in the tool AProVE.
We present novel semiring semantics for abstract reduction systems (ARSs). More precisely, we provide a weighted version of ARSs, where the reduction steps induce weights from a semiring. Inspired by provenance analysis in database theory and logic, we obtain a formalism that can be used for provenance analysis of arbitrary ARSs. Our semantics handle (possibly unbounded) non-determinism and possibly infinite reductions. Moreover, we develop several techniques to prove upper and lower bounds on the weights resulting from our semantics, and show that in this way one obtains a uniform approach to analyze several different properties like termination, derivational complexity, space complexity, safety, as well as combinations of these properties.
Dependency pairs (DPs) are one of the most powerful techniques for automated termination analysis of term rewrite systems. Recently, we adapted the DP framework to the probabilistic setting to prove almost-sure termination (AST) via annotated DPs (ADPs). However, this adaption only handled AST w.r.t. the innermost evaluation strategy. In this paper, we improve the ADP framework to prove AST for full rewriting. Moreover, we refine the framework for rewrite sequences that start with basic terms containing a single defined function symbol. We implemented and evaluated the new framework in our tool AProVE.
There exist several results on deciding termination and computing runtime bounds for triangular weakly non-linear loops (twn-loops). We show how to use results on such subclasses of programs where complexity bounds are computable within incomplete approaches for complexity analysis of full integer programs. To this end, we present a novel modular approach which computes local runtime bounds for subprograms which can be transformed into twn-loops. These local runtime bounds are then lifted to global runtime bounds for the whole program. The power of our approach is shown by our implementation in the tool KoAT which analyzes complexity of programs where all other state-of-the-art tools fail.