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Section: New Results

Program Certifications and Formalisation of Mathematics

Participants : Julien Cohen, Rémi Douence, Guilhem Jaber, Assia Mahboubi, Igor Zhirkov.

CoqTL: A Coq DSL for Rule-Based Model Transformation

In model-driven engineering, model transformation (MT) verification is essential for reliably producing software artifacts. While recent advancements have enabled automatic Hoare-style verification for non-trivial MTs, there are certain verification tasks (e.g. induction) that are intrinsically difficult to automate. Existing tools that aim at simplifying the interactive verification of MTs typically translate the MT specification (e.g. in ATL) and properties to prove (e.g. in OCL) into an interactive theorem prover. However, since the MT specification and proof phases happen in separate languages, the proof developer needs a detailed knowledge of the translation logic. Naturally, any error in the MT translation could cause unsound verification, i.e. the MT executed in the original environment may have different semantics from the verified MT. In [2] , we propose an alternative solution by designing and implementing an internal domain specific language, namely CoqTL, for the specification of declarative MTs directly in the Coq interactive theorem prover. Expressions in CoqTL are written in Gallina (the specification language of Coq), increasing the possibilities of reusing native Coq libraries in the transformation definition and proof. CoqTL specifications can be directly executed by our transformation engine encoded in Coq, or a certified implementation of the transformation can be generated by the native Coq extraction mechanism. We ensure that CoqTL has the same expressive power of Gallina (i.e. if a MT can be computed in Gallina, then it can also be represented in CoqTL). In this article, we introduce CoqTL, evaluate its practical applicability on a use case, and identify its current limitations.

A certificate-based approach to formally verified approximations.

In [12], we present a library to verify rigorous approximations of univariate functions on real numbers, with the Coq proof assistant. Based on interval arithmetic, this library also implements a technique of validation a posteriori based on the Banach fixed-point theorem. We illustrate this technique on the case of operations of division and square root. This library features a collection of abstract structures that organise the specification of rigorous approximations, and modularise the related proofs. Finally, we provide an implementation of verified Chebyshev approximations, and we discuss a few examples of computations.

Formally Verified Approximations of Definite Integrals.

Finding an elementary form for an antiderivative is often a difficult task, so numerical integration has become a common tool when it comes to making sense of a definite integral. Some of the numerical integration methods can even be made rigorous: not only do they compute an approximation of the integral value but they also bound its inaccuracy. Yet numerical integration is still missing from the toolbox when performing formal proofs in analysis. In [5], we present an efficient method for automatically computing and proving bounds on some definite integrals inside the Coq formal system. Our approach is not based on traditional quadrature methods such as Newton-Cotes formulas. Instead, it relies on computing and evaluating antiderivatives of rigorous polynomial approximations, combined with an adaptive domain splitting. Our approach also handles improper integrals, provided that a factor of the integrand belongs to a catalog of identified integrable functions. This work has been integrated to the CoqInterval library.

Reasoning about exact memory transformations induced by refactorings in CompCert C

[18] reports on our work in extending CompCert memory model with a relation to model relocations. It preserves undefined values unlike similar relations defined in CompCert. This relation commutes with memory operations. Our main contributions are the relation itself and mechanically checked proofs of its commutation properties. We intend to use this extension to construct and verify a refactoring tool for programs written in C.

Automating Contextual Equivalence for Higher-Order Programs with References

In [4], we have proposed a framework to study contextual equivalence of programs written in a call-by-value functional language with local integer references. It reduces the problem of contextual equivalence to the problem of non-reachability in a transition system of memory configurations. This reduction is complete for recursion-free programs. Restricting to programs that do not allocate references inside the body of functions, we have encoded this non-reachability problem as a set of constrained Horn clause that can then be checked for satisfiability automatically. Restricting furthermore to a language with finite data-types, we also get a new decidability result for contextual equivalence at any type.