Content area

Abstract

Formally verifying system properties is one of the most effective ways of improving system quality, but its high manual effort requirements often render it prohibitively expensive. Tools that automate formal verification, by learning from proof corpora to suggest proofs, have just begun to show their promise. These tools are effective because of the richness of the data the proof corpora contain. This richness comes from the stylistic conventions followed by communities of proof developers, together with the logical systems beneath proof assistants. However, this richness remains underexploited, with most work thus far focusing on architecture rather than making the most of the proof data. In this paper, we develop Passport, a fully-automated proof-synthesis tool that systematically explores how to most effectively exploit one aspect of that proof data: identifiers. Passport enriches a predictive Coq model with three new encoding mechanisms for identifiers: category vocabulary indexing, subword sequence modeling, and path elaboration. We compare Passport to three existing base tools which Passport can enhance: ASTactic, Tac, and Tok. In head-to-head comparisons, Passport automatically proves 29% more theorems than the best-performing of these base tools. Combining the three Passport-enhanced tools automatically proves 38% more theorems than the three base tools together, without Passport's enhancements. Finally, together, these base tools and Passport-enhanced tools prove 45% more theorems than the combined base tools without Passport's enhancements. Overall, our findings suggest that modeling identifiers can play a significant role in improving proof synthesis, leading to higher-quality software.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Identifier / keyword
Title
Passport: Improving Automated Formal Verification Using Identifiers
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2022
Publication date
Aug 2, 2022
Section
Computer Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2023-08-10
Milestone dates
2022-04-21 (Submission v1); 2022-08-02 (Submission v2)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
10 Aug 2023
ProQuest document ID
2654699434
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/passport-improving-automated-formal-verification/docview/2654699434/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2022. This work is published under http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2023-08-11
Database
ProQuest One Academic