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A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs

Schröer, Philipp; Batz, Kevin; Kaminski, Benjamin Lucien; Katoen, Joost-Pieter; Matheja, Christoph; (2023) A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages , 7 (OOPSLA2) , Article 294. 10.1145/3622870. Green open access

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Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative program verification infrastructure for discrete probabilistic programs. Our infrastructure can be viewed as the probabilistic analogue of Boogie: its central components are an intermediate verification language (IVL) together with a real-valued logic. Our IVL provides a programming-language-style for expressing verification conditions whose validity implies the correctness of a program under investigation. As our focus is on verifying quantitative properties such as bounds on expected outcomes, expected run-times, or termination probabilities, off-the-shelf IVLs based on Boolean first-order logic do not suffice. Instead, a paradigm shift from the standard Boolean to a real-valued domain is required. Our IVL features quantitative generalizations of standard verification constructs such as assume- and assert-statements. Verification conditions are generated by a weakest-precondition-style semantics, based on our real-valued logic. We show that our verification infrastructure supports natural encodings of numerous verification techniques from the literature. With our SMT-based implementation, we automatically verify a variety of benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this establishes the first deductive verification infrastructure for expectation-based reasoning about probabilistic programs.

Type: Article
Title: A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/3622870
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1145/3622870
Language: English
Additional information: © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179714
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