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Volume 14, Issue 1
2018
1. Compatibility Properties of Synchronously and Asynchronously Communicating Components
We study interacting components and their compatibility with respect to synchronous and asynchronous composition. The behavior of components is formalized by I/O-transition systems. Synchronous composition is based on simultaneous execution of shared output and input actions of two components while asynchronous composition uses unbounded FIFO-buffers for message transfer. In both contexts we study compatibility notions based on the idea that any output issued by one component should be accepted as an input by the other. We distinguish between strong and weak versions of compatibility, the latter allowing the execution of internal actions before a message is accepted. We consider open systems and study conditions under which (strong/weak) synchronous compatibility is sufficient and necessary to get (strong/weak) asynchronous compatibility. We show that these conditions characterize half-duplex systems. Then we focus on the verification of weak asynchronous compatibility for possibly non half-duplex systems and provide a decidable criterion that ensures weak asynchronous compatibility. We investigate conditions under which this criterion is complete, i.e. if it is not satisfied then the asynchronous system is not weakly asynchronously compatible. Finally, we discuss deadlock-freeness and investigate relationships between deadlock-freeness in the synchronous and in the asynchronous case.
2. Intersection Types for the lambda-mu Calculus
We introduce an intersection type system for the lambda-mu calculus that is invariant under subject reduction and expansion. The system is obtained by describing Streicher and Reus's denotational model of continuations in the category of omega-algebraic lattices via Abramsky's domain-logic approach. This provides at the same time an interpretation of the type system and a proof of the completeness of the system with respect to the continuation models by means of a filter model construction. We then define a restriction of our system, such that a lambda-mu term is typeable if and only if it is strongly normalising. We also show that Parigot's typing of lambda-mu terms with classically valid propositional formulas can be translated into the restricted system, which then provides an alternative proof of strong normalisability for the typed lambda-mu calculus.
3. 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.
4. Soundness in negotiations
Negotiations are a formalism for describing multiparty distributed cooperation. Alternatively, they can be seen as a model of concurrency with synchronized choice as communication primitive. Well-designed negotiations must be sound, meaning that, whatever its current state, the negotiation can still be completed. In earlier work, Esparza and Desel have shown that deciding soundness of a negotiation is Pspace-complete, and in Ptime if the negotiation is deterministic. They have also extended their polynomial soundness algorithm to an intermediate class of acyclic, non-deterministic negotiations. However, they did not analyze the runtime of the extended algorithm, and also left open the complexity of the soundness problem for the intermediate class. In the first part of this paper we revisit the soundness problem for deterministic negotiations, and show that it is Nlogspace-complete, improving on the earlier algorithm, which requires linear space. In the second part we answer the question left open by Esparza and Desel. We prove that the soundness problem can be solved in polynomial time for acyclic, weakly non- deterministic negotiations, a more general class than the one considered by them. In the third and final part, we show that the techniques developed in the first two parts of the paper can be applied to analysis problems other than soundness, including the problem of detecting race conditions, and several classical static analysis problems. More specifically, we show […]
Section:
Concurrency theory
5. Pushing for weighted tree automata
A weight normalization procedure, commonly called pushing, is introduced for weighted tree automata (wta) over commutative semifields. The normalization preserves the recognized weighted tree language even for nondeterministic wta, but it is most useful for bottom-up deterministic wta, where it can be used for minimization and equivalence testing. In both applications a careful selection of the weights to be redistributed followed by normalization allows a reduction of the general problem to the corresponding problem for bottom-up deterministic unweighted tree automata. This approach was already successfully used by Mohri and Eisner for the minimization of deterministic weighted string automata. Moreover, the new equivalence test for two wta $M$ and $M'$ runs in time $\mathcal O((\lvert M \rvert + \lvert M'\rvert) \cdot \log {(\lvert Q\rvert + \lvert Q'\rvert)})$, where $Q$ and $Q'$ are the states of $M$ and $M'$, respectively, which improves the previously best run-time $\mathcal O(\lvert M \rvert \cdot \lvert M'\rvert)$.
6. Mending Fences with Self-Invalidation and Self-Downgrade
Cache coherence protocols based on self-invalidation and self-downgrade have recently seen increased popularity due to their simplicity, potential performance efficiency, and low energy consumption. However, such protocols result in memory instruction reordering, thus causing extra program behaviors that are often not intended by the programmers. We propose a novel formal model that captures the semantics of programs running under such protocols, and features a set of fences that interact with the coherence layer. Using the model, we design an algorithm to analyze the reachability and check whether a program satisfies a given safety property with the current set of fences. We describe a method for insertion of optimal sets of fences that ensure correctness of the program under such protocols. The method relies on a counter-example guided fence insertion procedure. One feature of our method is that it can handle a variety of fences (with different costs). This diversity makes optimization more difficult since one has to optimize the total cost of the inserted fences, rather than just their number. To demonstrate the strength of our approach, we have implemented a prototype and run it on a wide range of examples and benchmarks. We have also, using simulation, evaluated the performance of the resulting fenced programs.
7. The Ho-Zhao Problem
Given a poset $P$, the set, $\Gamma(P)$, of all Scott closed sets ordered by inclusion forms a complete lattice. A subcategory $\mathbf{C}$ of $\mathbf{Pos}_d$ (the category of posets and Scott-continuous maps) is said to be $\Gamma$-faithful if for any posets $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbf{C}$, $\Gamma(P) \cong \Gamma(Q)$ implies $P \cong Q$. It is known that the category of all continuous dcpos and the category of bounded complete dcpos are $\Gamma$-faithful, while $\mathbf{Pos}_d$ is not. Ho & Zhao (2009) asked whether the category $\mathbf{DCPO}$ of dcpos is $\Gamma$-faithful. In this paper, we answer this question in the negative by exhibiting a counterexample. To achieve this, we introduce a new subcategory of dcpos which is $\Gamma$-faithful. This subcategory subsumes all currently known $\Gamma$-faithful subcategories. With this new concept in mind, we construct the desired counterexample which relies heavily on Johnstone's famous dcpo which is not sober in its Scott topology.
8. Globular: an online proof assistant for higher-dimensional rewriting
This article introduces Globular, an online proof assistant for the formalization and verification of proofs in higher-dimensional category theory. The tool produces graphical visualizations of higher-dimensional proofs, assists in their construction with a point-and- click interface, and performs type checking to prevent incorrect rewrites. Hosted on the web, it has a low barrier to use, and allows hyperlinking of formalized proofs directly from research papers. It allows the formalization of proofs from logic, topology and algebra which are not formalizable by other methods, and we give several examples.
9. A Load-Buffer Semantics for Total Store Ordering
We address the problem of verifying safety properties of concurrent programs running over the Total Store Order (TSO) memory model. Known decision procedures for this model are based on complex encodings of store buffers as lossy channels. These procedures assume that the number of processes is fixed. However, it is important in general to prove the correctness of a system/algorithm in a parametric way with an arbitrarily large number of processes. In this paper, we introduce an alternative (yet equivalent) semantics to the classical one for the TSO semantics that is more amenable to efficient algorithmic verification and for the extension to parametric verification. For that, we adopt a dual view where load buffers are used instead of store buffers. The flow of information is now from the memory to load buffers. We show that this new semantics allows (1) to simplify drastically the safety analysis under TSO, (2) to obtain a spectacular gain in efficiency and scalability compared to existing procedures, and (3) to extend easily the decision procedure to the parametric case, which allows obtaining a new decidability result, and more importantly, a verification algorithm that is more general and more efficient in practice than the one for bounded instances.
10. A Real-Valued Modal Logic
A many-valued modal logic is introduced that combines the usual Kripke frame semantics of the modal logic K with connectives interpreted locally at worlds by lattice and group operations over the real numbers. A labelled tableau system is provided and a coNEXPTIME upper bound obtained for checking validity in the logic. Focussing on the modal-multiplicative fragment, the labelled tableau system is then used to establish completeness for a sequent calculus that admits cut-elimination and an axiom system that extends the multiplicative fragment of Abelian logic.
11. Logical relations for coherence of effect subtyping
A coercion semantics of a programming language with subtyping is typically defined on typing derivations rather than on typing judgments. To avoid semantic ambiguity, such a semantics is expected to be coherent, i.e., independent of the typing derivation for a given typing judgment. In this article we present heterogeneous, biorthogonal, step-indexed logical relations for establishing the coherence of coercion semantics of programming languages with subtyping. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proof method, we develop a proof of coherence of a type-directed, selective CPS translation from a typed call-by-value lambda calculus with delimited continuations and control-effect subtyping. The article is accompanied by a Coq formalization that relies on a novel shallow embedding of a logic for reasoning about step-indexing.
12. Automated Synthesis of Distributed Self-Stabilizing Protocols
In this paper, we introduce an SMT-based method that automatically synthesizes a distributed self-stabilizing protocol from a given high-level specification and network topology. Unlike existing approaches, where synthesis algorithms require the explicit description of the set of legitimate states, our technique only needs the temporal behavior of the protocol. We extend our approach to synthesize ideal-stabilizing protocols, where every state is legitimate. We also extend our technique to synthesize monotonic-stabilizing protocols, where during recovery, each process can execute an most once one action. Our proposed methods are fully implemented and we report successful synthesis of well-known protocols such as Dijkstra's token ring, a self-stabilizing version of Raymond's mutual exclusion algorithm, ideal-stabilizing leader election and local mutual exclusion, as well as monotonic-stabilizing maximal independent set and distributed Grundy coloring.
13. A generalization of a theorem of Hurewicz for quasi-Polish spaces
We identify four countable topological spaces $S_2$, $S_1$, $S_D$, and $S_0$ which serve as canonical examples of topological spaces which fail to be quasi-Polish. These four spaces respectively correspond to the $T_2$, $T_1$, $T_D$, and $T_0$-separation axioms. $S_2$ is the space of rationals, $S_1$ is the natural numbers with the cofinite topology, $S_D$ is an infinite chain without a top element, and $S_0$ is the set of finite sequences of natural numbers with the lower topology induced by the prefix ordering. Our main result is a generalization of Hurewicz's theorem showing that a co-analytic subset of a quasi-Polish space is either quasi-Polish or else contains a countable $\Pi^0_2$-subset homeomorphic to one of these four spaces.
14. Some model theory for the modal $\mu$-calculus: syntactic characterisations of semantic properties
This paper contributes to the theory of the modal $\mu$-calculus by proving some model-theoretic results. More in particular, we discuss a number of semantic properties pertaining to formulas of the modal $\mu$-calculus. For each of these properties we provide a corresponding syntactic fragment, in the sense that a $\mu$-formula $\xi$ has the given property iff it is equivalent to a formula $\xi'$ in the corresponding fragment. Since this formula $\xi'$ will always be effectively obtainable from $\xi$, as a corollary, for each of the properties under discussion, we prove that it is decidable in elementary time whether a given $\mu$-calculus formula has the property or not. The properties that we study all concern the way in which the meaning of a formula $\xi$ in a model depends on the meaning of a single, fixed proposition letter $p$. For example, consider a formula $\xi$ which is monotone in $p$; such a formula a formula $\xi$ is called continuous (respectively, fully additive), if in addition it satisfies the property that, if $\xi$ is true at a state $s$ then there is a finite set (respectively, a singleton set) $U$ such that $\xi$ remains true at $s$ if we restrict the interpretation of $p$ to the set $U$. Each of the properties that we consider is, in a similar way, associated with one of the following special kinds of subset of a tree model: singletons, finite sets, finitely branching subtrees, noetherian subtrees (i.e., without infinite paths), and […]
15. Families of DFAs as Acceptors of $\omega$-Regular Languages
Families of DFAs (FDFAs) provide an alternative formalism for recognizing $\omega$-regular languages. The motivation for introducing them was a desired correlation between the automaton states and right congruence relations, in a manner similar to the Myhill-Nerode theorem for regular languages. This correlation is beneficial for learning algorithms, and indeed it was recently shown that $\omega$-regular languages can be learned from membership and equivalence queries, using FDFAs as the acceptors. In this paper, we look into the question of how suitable FDFAs are for defining omega-regular languages. Specifically, we look into the complexity of performing Boolean operations, such as complementation and intersection, on FDFAs, the complexity of solving decision problems, such as emptiness and language containment, and the succinctness of FDFAs compared to standard deterministic and nondeterministic $\omega$-automata. We show that FDFAs enjoy the benefits of deterministic automata with respect to Boolean operations and decision problems. Namely, they can all be performed in nondeterministic logarithmic space. We provide polynomial translations of deterministic Büchi and co-Büchi automata to FDFAs and of FDFAs to nondeterministic Büchi automata (NBAs). We show that translation of an NBA to an FDFA may involve an exponential blowup. Last, we show that FDFAs are more succinct than deterministic parity automata (DPAs) in the sense that translating a DPA to an FDFA can […]
16. An enriched view on the extended finitary monad--Lawvere theory correspondence
We give a new account of the correspondence, first established by Nishizawa--Power, between finitary monads and Lawvere theories over an arbitrary locally finitely presentable base. Our account explains this correspondence in terms of enriched category theory: the passage from a finitary monad to the corresponding Lawvere theory is exhibited as an instance of free completion of an enriched category under a class of absolute colimits. This extends work of the first author, who established the result in the special case of finitary monads and Lawvere theories over the category of sets; a novel aspect of the generalisation is its use of enrichment over a bicategory, rather than a monoidal category, in order to capture the monad--theory correspondence over all locally finitely presentable bases simultaneously.
17. Dynamic Causality in Event Structures
Event Structures (ESs) address the representation of direct relationships between individual events, usually capturing the notions of causality and conflict. Up to now, such relationships have been static, i.e., they cannot change during a system run. Thus, the common ESs only model a static view on systems. We make causality dynamic by allowing causal dependencies between some events to be changed by occurrences of other events. We first model and study the case in which events may entail the removal of causal dependencies, then we consider the addition of causal dependencies, and finally we combine both approaches in the so-called Dynamic Causality ESs. For all three newly defined types of ESs, we study their expressive power in comparison to the well-known Prime ESs, Dual ESs, Extended Bundle ESs, and ESs for Resolvable Conflicts. Interestingly, Dynamic Causality ESs subsume Extended Bundle ESs and Dual ESs but are incomparable with ESs for Resolvable Conflicts.
18. Mixin Composition Synthesis based on Intersection Types
We present a method for synthesizing compositions of mixins using type inhabitation in intersection types. First, recursively defined classes and mixins, which are functions over classes, are expressed as terms in a lambda calculus with records. Intersection types with records and record-merge are used to assign meaningful types to these terms without resorting to recursive types. Second, typed terms are translated to a repository of typed combinators. We show a relation between record types with record-merge and intersection types with constructors. This relation is used to prove soundness and partial completeness of the translation with respect to mixin composition synthesis. Furthermore, we demonstrate how a translated repository and goal type can be used as input to an existing framework for composition synthesis in bounded combinatory logic via type inhabitation. The computed result is a class typed by the goal type and generated by a mixin composition applied to an existing class.
19. A coalgebraic treatment of conditional transition systems with upgrades
We consider conditional transition systems, that model software product lines with upgrades, in a coalgebraic setting. By using Birkhoff's duality for distributive lattices, we derive two equivalent Kleisli categories in which these coalgebras live: Kleisli categories based on the reader and on the so-called lattice monad over $\mathsf{Poset}$. We study two different functors describing the branching type of the coalgebra and investigate the resulting behavioural equivalence. Furthermore we show how an existing algorithm for coalgebra minimisation can be instantiated to derive behavioural equivalences in this setting.
20. A Proof of Stavi's Theorem
Kamp's theorem established the expressive equivalence of the temporal logic with Until and Since and the First-Order Monadic Logic of Order (FOMLO) over the Dedekind-complete time flows. However, this temporal logic is not expressively complete for FOMLO over the rationals. Stavi introduced two additional modalities and proved that the temporal logic with Until, Since and Stavi's modalities is expressively equivalent to FOMLO over all linear orders. We present a simple proof of Stavi's theorem.
21. Weighted omega-Restricted One Counter Automata
Let $S$ be a complete star-omega semiring and $\Sigma$ be an alphabet. For a weighted $\omega$-restricted one-counter automaton $\mathcal{C}$ with set of states $\{1, \dots, n\}$, $n \geq 1$, we show that there exists a mixed algebraic system over a complete semiring-semimodule pair ${((S \ll \Sigma^* \gg)^{n\times n}, (S \ll \Sigma^{\omega}\gg)^n)}$ such that the behavior $\Vert\mathcal{C} \Vert$ of $\mathcal{C}$ is a component of a solution of this system. In case the basic semiring is $\mathbb{B}$ or $\mathbb{N}^{\infty}$ we show that there exists a mixed context-free grammar that generates $\Vert\mathcal{C} \Vert$. The construction of the mixed context-free grammar from $\mathcal{C}$ is a generalization of the well-known triple construction in case of restricted one-counter automata and is called now triple-pair construction for $\omega$-restricted one-counter automata.
22. Model Theory and Proof Theory of Coalgebraic Predicate Logic
We propose a generalization of first-order logic originating in a neglected work by C.C. Chang: a natural and generic correspondence language for any types of structures which can be recast as Set-coalgebras. We discuss axiomatization and completeness results for several natural classes of such logics. Moreover, we show that an entirely general completeness result is not possible. We study the expressive power of our language, both in comparison with coalgebraic hybrid logics and with existing first-order proposals for special classes of Set-coalgebras (apart from relational structures, also neighbourhood frames and topological spaces). Basic model-theoretic constructions and results, in particular ultraproducts, obtain for the two classes that allow completeness---and in some cases beyond that. Finally, we discuss a basic sequent system, for which we establish a syntactic cut-elimination result.
23. The sequential functionals of type $(\iota \rightarrow \iota)^n \rightarrow \iota$ form a dcpo for all $n \in \Bbb N$
We prove that the sequential functionals of some fixed types at type level 2, taking finite sequences of unary functions as arguments, do form a directed complete partial ordering. This gives a full characterisation of for which types the partially ordered set of sequential functionals has this property. As a tool, we prove a normal form theorem for the finite sequential functionals of the types in question,
24. Proof-Relevant Logical Relations for Name Generation
Pitts and Stark's $\nu$-calculus is a paradigmatic total language for studying the problem of contextual equivalence in higher-order languages with name generation. Models for the $\nu$-calculus that validate basic equivalences concerning names may be constructed using functor categories or nominal sets, with a dynamic allocation monad used to model computations that may allocate fresh names. If recursion is added to the language and one attempts to adapt the models from (nominal) sets to (nominal) domains, however, the direct-style construction of the allocation monad no longer works. This issue has previously been addressed by using a monad that combines dynamic allocation with continuations, at some cost to abstraction. This paper presents a direct-style model of a $\nu$-calculus-like language with recursion using the novel framework of proof-relevant logical relations, in which logical relations also contain objects (or proofs) demonstrating the equivalence of (the semantic counterparts of) programs. Apart from providing a fresh solution to an old problem, this work provides an accessible setting in which to introduce the use of proof-relevant logical relations, free of the additional complexities associated with their use for more sophisticated languages.
25. A survey on difference hierarchies of regular languages
Difference hierarchies were originally introduced by Hausdorff and they play an important role in descriptive set theory. In this survey paper, we study difference hierarchies of regular languages. The first sections describe standard techniques on difference hierarchies, mostly due to Hausdorff. We illustrate these techniques by giving decidability results on the difference hierarchies based on shuffle ideals, strongly cyclic regular languages and the polynomial closure of group languages.