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Section: New Results

New results on Transversal Concern: Missing Models

Participants : Hugo Bazille, Sihem Cherrared, Éric Fabre, Blaise Genest, Thierry Jéron, The Anh Pham

Unfolding-based dynamic partial-order reduction of asynchronous distributed programs

Unfolding-based Dynamic Partial Order Reduction (UDPOR) is a recent technique mixing Dynamic Partial Order Reduction (DPOR) with concepts of concurrency such as unfoldings to efficiently mitigate state space explosion in model-checking of concurrent programs. It is optimal in the sense that each Mazurkiewicz trace, i.e. a class of interleavings equivalent by commuting independent actions, is explored exactly once. In this work [25] we show that UDPOR can be extended to verify asynchronous distributed applications, where processes both communicate by messages and synchronize on shared resources. To do so, a general model of asynchronous distributed programs is formalized in TLA+. This allows to define an independence relation, a main ingredient of the unfolding semantics used by UDPOR during the UDPOR exploration. Then, the adaptation of UDPOR, involving the construction of an unfolding during the execution of the applicaton (i.e. with no model of the application but the code iteself), is made efficient by a precise analysis of dependencies. A prototype implementation gives promising experimental results.

Learning models for telecommunication management.

Model based methods have been recognised as the most appropriate approach to fault diagnosis in telecommunication networks, as they not only help in detecting and classifying failures, but is also provides useful explanations about the propagation of faults in such large distributed and concurrent systems. However, the bottleneck of these methods is of course the derivation and validation of a relevant model [8]. We have explored two techniques in this direction, based on fault/stress injection.

A first approach (collaboration Orange Labs) [33] consists in assembling generic components that would match the current (changing) topology of a software defined network. The model can then be validated by fault injection on a platform running the true VNF (virtual network functions) chains that are used in production. The second approach (collaboration Nokia Bell Labs) aims at detecting soft performance degradations, that would impact the quality of service, but not produce faults and alarms. Again, this can be achieved by stress injection at the level of VMs (virtual machines) in production software, and by collecting signature patterns under the form of statistical changes in the performance metrics collected on such systems.

Verification of deep neural networks.

Deep neural networks are as effective in their respective tasks as hardly understandable by a human. To use them in critical applications, not only they should be understood, they must be certified. We surveyed in [14] a large number of recent attempts to formally certify deep neural networks obtained by deep machine learning techniques. Most of the work currently focus on forward-propagating networks, and the problem of certifying their robustness.