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We study the Maximum Budgeted Allocation problem, i.e., the problem of selling a set of m indivisible goods to n players, each with a separate budget, such that we maximize the collected revenue. Since the natural assignment LP is known to have an integrality gap of, which matches the best known approximation algorithms, our main focus is to improve our understanding of the stronger configuration LP relaxation. In this direction, we prove that the integrality gap of the configuration LP is strictly better than, and provide corresponding polynomial time roundings, in the following restrictions of the problem: (i) the Restricted Budgeted Allocation problem, in which all the players have the same budget and every item has the same value for any player it can be sold to, and (ii) the graph MBA problem, in which an item can be assigned to at most 2 players. Finally, we improve the best known upper bound on the integrality gap for the general case from 5/6 to 2√2 2 ≈ 0.828 and also prove hardness of approximation results for both cases., QC 20150612

When a developer pushes a change to an application’s codebase, a good practice is to have a test case specifying this behavioral change. Thanks to continuous integration (CI), the test is run on subsequent commits to check that they do no introduce a regression for that behavior. In this paper, we propose an approach that detects behavioral changes in commits. As input, it takes a program, its test suite, and a commit. Its output is a set of test methods that capture the behavioral difference between the pre-commit and post-commit versions of the program. We call our approach DCI (Detecting behavioral changes in CI). It works by generating variations of the existing test cases through (i) assertion amplification and (ii) a search-based exploration of the input space. We evaluate our approach on a curated set of 60 commits from 6 open source Java projects. To our knowledge, this is the first ever curated dataset of real-world behavioral changes. Our evaluation shows that DCI is able to generate test methods that detect behavioral changes. Our approach is fully automated and can be integrated into current development processes. The main limitations are that it targets unit tests and works on a relatively small fraction of commits. More specifically, DCI works on commits that have a unit test that already executes the modified code. In practice, from our benchmark projects, we found 15.29% of commits to meet the conditions required by DCI. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature., QC 20200707

Embedded control software is used in a variety of industries, such as in the automotive and railway domains, or in industrial automation and robotization. The development of such software is subject to tight time-to-market requirements, but at the same time also to very high safety requirements posed by various safety standards. To assure the latter, formal methods such as model-based testing and formal verification are increasingly used. However, the main obstacle to a more wide-scale adoption of these methods, and especially of formal verification, is the currently relative low level of automation of the verification process and integration in the general software development cycle. At present, writing formal specifications and annotating the embedded code is still a highly labour intensive activity requiring special competence and skills. In this track we address this challenge from various angles. We start by introducing the topic and then give a summary of the contributions., QC 20210301

Assertion-based software model checking refers to techniques that take a program annotated with logical assertions and statically verify that the assertions hold whenever program execution is at the corresponding control point. While the associated annotation overhead is relatively low, these techniques are typically monolithic in that they explore the state space of the whole program at once, and may therefore scale poorly to large programs. Deductive software verification, on the other hand, refers to techniques that prove the correctness of a piece of software against a detailed specification of what it is supposed to accomplish or compute. The associated verification techniques are modular and scale well to large code bases, but incur an annotation overhead that is often very high, which is a real obstacle for deductive verification to be adopted in industry on a wider scale. In this paper we explore synergies between the two mentioned paradigms, and in particular, investigate how interpolation-based Horn solvers used for software model checking can be instrumented to infer missing procedure contracts for use in deductive verification, thus aiding the programmer in the code annotation process. We summarise the main developments in the area of automated contract inference, and present our own experiments with contract inference for C programs, based on solving Horn clauses. To drive the inference process, we put program assertions in the main function, and adapt our TriCera tool, a model checker based on the Horn solver Eldarica, to infer candidate contracts for all other functions. The contracts are output in the ANSI C Specification Language (ACSL) format, and are then validated with the Frama-C deductive verification tool for C programs., QC 20210301

Distance-bounding anonymous credentials could be used for any location proofs that do not need to identify the prover and thus could make even notoriously invasive mechanisms such as location-based services privacy-preserving. There is, however, no secure distance-bounding protocol for general attribute-based anonymous credentials. Brands and Chaum’s (EUROCRYPT’93) protocol combining distance-bounding and Schnorr identification comes close, but does not fulfill the requirements of modern distance-bounding protocols. For that, we need a secure distance-bounding zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge resisting mafia fraud, distance fraud, distance hijacking and terrorist fraud. Our approach is another attempt toward combining distance bounding and Schnorr to construct a distance-bounding zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge. We construct such a protocol and prove it secure in the (extended) DFKO model for distance bounding. We also performed a symbolic verification of security properties needed for resisting these attacks, implemented in Tamarin. Encouraged by results from Singh et al. (NDSS’19), we take advantage of lessened constraints on how much can be sent in the fast phase of the distance-bounding protocol and achieve a more efficient protocol. We also provide a version that does not rely on being able to send more than one bit at a time which yields the same properties except for (full) terrorist fraud resistance. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020., QC 20211001

We instantiate and apply a recently proposed abstract framework featuring an algorithm for the automatic generation of tests for component testing of message-passing systems. We demonstrate the application of a top-down mechanism for test generation. More precisely, we reduce the problem of generating tests for components of message-passing applications to the projection of global views of choreographies. The application of the framework to some examples gives us the pretext to make some considerations about our approach., QC 20210301

Modularity and compositionality in verification frameworks occur within different contexts: the model that is the verification target, the specification of the stipulated properties, and the employed verification principle. We give a representative overview of mechanisms to achieve modularity and compositionality along the three mentioned contexts and analyze how mechanisms in different contexts are related. In many verification frameworks one of the contexts carries the main burden. It is important to clarify these relations to understand the potential and limits of the different modularity mechanisms., QC 20210219

Build automation tools and package managers have a profound influence on software development. They facilitate the reuse of third-party libraries, support a clear separation between the application's code and its external dependencies, and automate several software development tasks. However, the wide adoption of these tools introduces new challenges related to dependency management. In this paper, we propose an original study of one such challenge: the emergence of bloated dependencies. Bloated dependencies are libraries that are packaged with the application's compiled code but that are actually not necessary to build and run the application. They artificially grow the size of the built binary and increase maintenance effort. We propose DepClean, a tool to determine the presence of bloated dependencies in Maven artifacts. We analyze 9,639 Java artifacts hosted on Maven Central, which include a total of 723,444 dependency relationships. Our key result is as follows: 2.7% of the dependencies directly declared are bloated, 15.4% of the inherited dependencies are bloated, and 57% of the transitive dependencies of the studied artifacts are bloated. In other words, it is feasible to reduce the number of dependencies of Maven artifacts to 1/4 of its current count. Our qualitative assessment with 30 notable open-source projects indicates that developers pay attention to their dependencies when they are notified of the problem. They are willing to remove bloated dependencies: 21/26 answered pull requests were accepted and merged by developers, removing 140 dependencies in total: 75 direct and 65 transitive., QC 20210519

When developing complex software and systems, contracts provide a means for controlling the complexity by dividing the responsibilities among the components of the system in a hierarchical fashion. In specific application areas, dedicated contract theories formalise the notion of contract and the operations on contracts in a manner that supports best the development of systems in that area. At the other end, contract meta-theories attempt to provide a systematic view on the various contract theories by axiomatising their desired properties. However, there exists a noticeable gap between the most well-known contract metatheory of Benveniste et al. [5], which focuses on the design of embedded and cyber-physical systems, and the established way of using contracts when developing general software, following Meyer's design-by-contract methodology [18]. At the core of this gap appears to be the notion of procedure: while it is a central unit of composition in software development, the meta-theory does not suggest an obvious way of treating procedures as components. In this paper, we provide a first step towards a contract theory that takes procedures as the basic building block, and is at the same time an instantiation of the meta-theory. To this end, we propose an abstract contract theory for sequential programming languages with procedures, based on denotational semantics. We show that, on the one hand, the specification of contracts of procedures in Hoare logic, and their procedure-modular verification, can be cast naturally in the framework of our abstract contract theory. On the other hand, we also show our contract theory to fulfil the axioms of the meta-theory. In this way, we give further evidence for the utility of the meta-theory, and prepare the ground for combining our instantiation with other, already existing instantiations., QC 20211215Part of proceeding: ISBN 978-3-030-71500-7; 978-3-030-71499-4

In this paper, we do automatic correctness assessment for patches generated by program repair systems. We consider the human-written patch as ground truth oracle and randomly generate tests based on it, a technique proposed by Shamshiri et al., called Random testing with Ground Truth (RGT) in this paper. We build a curated dataset of 638 patches for Defects4J generated by 14 state-of-the-art repair systems, we evaluate automated patch assessment on this dataset. The results of this study are novel and significant: First, we improve the state of the art performance of automatic patch assessment with RGT by 190% by improving the oracle; Second, we show that RGT is reliable enough to help scientists to do overfitting analysis when they evaluate program repair systems; Third, we improve the external validity of the program repair knowledge with the largest study ever., QC 20210406

Given a dynamic network, where edges appear and disappear over time, we are interested in finding sets of edges that have similar temporal behavior and form a dense subgraph. Formally, we define the problem as the enumeration of the maximal subgraphs that satisfy specific density and similarity thresholds. To measure the similarity of the temporal behavior, we use the correlation between the binary time series that represent the activity of the edges. For the density, we study two variants based on the average degree. For these problem variants we enumerate the maximal subgraphs and compute a compact subset of subgraphs that have limited overlap. We propose an approximate algorithm that scales well with the size of the network, while achieving a high accuracy. We evaluate our framework on both real and synthetic datasets. The results of the synthetic data demonstrate the high accuracy of the approximation and show the scalability of the framework., QC 20220105Conference ISBN: 978-3-030-75762-5; 978-3-030-75761-8

We introduce a novel problem for diversity-aware clustering. We assume that the potential cluster centers belong to a set of groups defined by protected attributes, such as ethnicity, gender, etc. We then ask to find a minimum-cost clustering of the data into k clusters so that a specified minimum number of cluster centers are chosen from each group. We thus require that all groups are represented in the clustering solution as cluster centers, according to specified requirements. More precisely, we are given a set of clients C, a set of facilities F, a collection F = {F-1,...,Ft} of facility groups F-i subset of F, a budget k, and a set of lower-bound thresholds R = {r(1),..,r(t)}, one for each group in The diversity-aware k-median problem asks to find a set S of k facilities in F such that vertical bar S boolean AND F-i vertical bar >= r(i), that is, at least ri centers in S are from group and the k-median cost Sigma(c is an element of C) min(s is an element of S) d(c, s) is minimized. We show that in the general case where the facility groups may overlap, the diversity-aware k-median problem is NP-hard, fixed-parameter intractable with respect to parameter k, and inapproximable to any multiplicative factor. On the other hand, when the facility groups are disjoint, approximation algorithms can be obtained by reduction to the matroid median and redblue median problems. Experimentally, we evaluate our approximation methods for the tractable cases, and present a relaxation-based heuristic for the theoretically intractable case, which can provide high-quality and efficient solutions for real-world datasets., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-030-86520-7, QC 20230117

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used in critical applications. To ensure dependability of MAS, we need to formally specify and verify their fault tolerance, i.e., to ensure that collaborative agent activities are performed correctly despite agent failure. In this paper, we present a formalisation of fault tolerant MAS and use it to define specification and refinement patterns for modelling MAS in Event-B., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-030-85738-7QC 20220510

Distributed systems address the increasing demand for fast access to resources and fault tolerance for data. However, due to scalability requirements, software developers need to trade consistency for performance. For certain data, consistency guarantees may be weakened if application correctness is unaffected. In contrast, data flow from data with weak consistency to data with strong consistency requirements is problematic, since application correctness may be broken. In this paper, we propose LCD, a higher-order static consistency-typed language with replicated data types. The type system of LCD statically enforces noninterference between data types with weak consistency and data types with strong consistency. This means that updates of weakly-consistent data can never affect strongly-consistent data. Finally, our main theorem guarantees sequential consistency for so-called con operations in our language., Part of ISBN 9783030727888QC 20220316

When searching for interesting structures in graphs, it is often important to take into account not only the graph connectivity, but also the metadata available, such as node and edge labels, or temporal information. In this paper we are interested in settings where such metadata is used to define a similarity between edges. We consider the problem of finding subgraphs that are dense and whose edges are similar to each other with respect to a given similarity function. Depending on the application, this function can be, for example, the Jaccard similarity between the edge label sets, or the temporal correlation of the edge occurrences in a temporal graph. We formulate a Lagrangian relaxation-based optimization problem to search for dense subgraphs with high pairwise edge similarity. We design a novel algorithm to solve the problem through parametric MIN-CUT [15,17], and provide an efficient search scheme to iterate through the values of the Lagrangian multipliers. Our study is complemented by an evaluation on real-world datasets, which demonstrates the usefulness and efficiency of the proposed approach., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-030-67664-3, QC 20230118

Modern safety-critical systems become increasingly networked and interconnected. To ensure their safety, the designers should guarantee not only that the critical parameters are accessed and modified by authorised users and components but also that the permitted operations should not violate safety. Traditionally, the designers rely on Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to define the access to the system parameters. In this paper, we define a safety-aware RBAC model that takes into account current system state and safety of intended actions. Our approach relies on contract-based reasoning and formal modelling in Event-B. The approach is illustrated by a case study – a supervised control of a power switch., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-030-68886-8QC 20220118

Multi-agent systems constitute a wide class of decentralised systems. Their functions are usually carried out by collaborative activities of agents. To ensure resilience of multi-agent systems, we should endow them with a capability to dynamically reconfigure. Usually, as a result of reconfiguration, the existing relationships between agents are changed and new collaborations are established. This is a complex and error-prone process, which can be facilitated by the use of formal reasoning and automated verification. In this paper, we propose a generic resilience-explicit formalisation of the main concepts of multi-agent systems. Based on it, we introduce corresponding specification and refinement patterns in Event-B. Our patterns facilitate modelling behaviour of resilient multi-agent systems in a rigorous systematic way and verification of their properties. We demonstrate the application of the proposed approach by a case study—a smart warehouse system., Export Date: 15 February 2021; Article; CODEN: CMPTA; Correspondence Address: Vistbakka, I.; Åbo Akademi UniversityFinland; email: inna.vistbakka@gmail.com

As a methodology for system design and testing, use cases are well-known and widely used. While current active machine learning (ML) algorithms can effectively automate unit testing, they do not scale up to use case testing of complex systems in an efficient way. We present a new parallel distributed processing (PDP) architecture for a constrained active machine learning (CAML) approach to use case testing. To exploit CAML we introduce a use case modeling language with: (i) compile-time constraints on query generation, and (ii) run-time constraints using dynamic constraint checking. We evaluate this approach by applying a prototype implementation of CAML to use case testing of simulated multi-vehicle autonomous driving scenarios., Part of proceedings ISBN: 978-3-030-79378-4QC 20220413

Automatic Program Repair (APR) techniques can promisingly help reduce the cost of debugging. Many relevant APR techniques follow the generate-and-validate approach, that is, the faulty program is iteratively modified with different change operators and then validated with a test suite until a plausible patch is generated. In particular, Kali is a generate-and-validate technique developed to investigate the possibility of generating plausible patches by only removing code. Former studies show that indeed Kali successfully addressed several faults. This paper addresses the single and particular case of code-removal patches in automated program repair. We investigate the reasons and the scenarios that make their creation possible, and the relationship with patches implemented by developers. Our study reveals that code-removal patches are often insufficient to fix bugs, and proposes a comprehensive taxonomy of code-removal patches that provides evidence of the problems that may affect test suites, opening new opportunities for researchers in the field of automatic program repair., QC 20220817

Safety-critical control systems increasingly rely on networking technologies, which makes these systems vulnerable to cyber attacks that can potentially jeopardise system safety. To achieve safe- and secure-by-construction development, the designers should analyse the impact of security attacks already at the modelling stage. Since SysML is often used for modelling safety-critical systems, in this paper, we propose to integrate modelling in SysML and Event-B to enable reasoning about safety-security interactions at system modelling stage. Our approach combines the benefits of graphical modelling in SysML with the mathematical rigor of Event-B to visualise and formalise the analysis of the impact of security attacks on system safety., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-031-15842-1, ISBN 978-3-031-15841-4QC 20221031

The research community working on formal software verification has historically evolved into two main camps, grouped around two verification methods that are typically referred to as Deductive Verification and Model Checking. In this paper, we present an approach that applies deductive verification to formally justify abstract models for model checking in the TLA framework. We present a proof-of-concept tool chain for C programs, based on Frama-C for deductive verification and TLA+ for model checking. As a theoretical foundation, we summarise a previously developed abstract contract theory as a framework for combining these two methods. Since the contract theory adheres to the principles of contract based design, this justifies the use of the approach in a real-world system design setting. We evaluate our approach on two case studies: a simple C program simulating opening and closing of files, as well as a C program based on real software from the automotive industry., QC 20230622

The Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) model serves as a common abstraction of many modern large-scale data processing frameworks, and has been receiving increasingly more attention over the past few years, especially in the context of classical graph problems. So far, the only way to argue lower bounds for this model is to condition on conjectures about the hardness of some specific problems, such as graph connectivity on promise graphs that are either one cycle or two cycles, usually called the one cycle versus two cycles problem. This is unlike the traditional arguments based on conjectures about complexity classes (e.g., P≠ NP), which are often more robust in the sense that refuting them would lead to groundbreaking algorithms for a whole bunch of problems. In this paper we present connections between problems and classes of problems that allow the latter type of arguments. These connections concern the class of problems solvable in a sublogarithmic amount of rounds in the MPC model, denoted by MPC(o(log N)) , and the standard space complexity classes L and NL, and suggest conjectures that are robust in the sense that refuting them would lead to many surprisingly fast new algorithms in the MPC model. We also obtain new conditional lower bounds, and prove new reductions and equivalences between problems in the MPC model. Specifically, our main results are as follows.Lower bounds conditioned on the one cycle versus two cycles conjecture can be instead argued under the L⊈ MPC(o(log N)) conjecture: these two assumptions are equivalent, and refuting either of them would lead to o(log N) -round MPC algorithms for a large number of challenging problems, including list ranking, minimum cut, and planarity testing. In fact, we show that these problems and many others require asymptotically the same number of rounds as the seemingly much easier problem of distinguishing between a graph being one cycle or two cycles.Many lower bounds previously argued under the one cycle, QC 20221006

We study the following question, first publicly posed by Hosoyamada and Yamakawa in 2018. Can parties A, B with quantum computing power and classical communication rely only on a random oracle (that can be queried in quantum superposition) to agree on a key that is private from eavesdroppers? We make the first progress on the question above and prove the following. - When only one of the parties A is classical and the other party B is quantum powered, as long as they ask a total of d oracle queries and agree on a key with probability 1, then there is always a way to break the key agreement by asking O(d(2)) number of classical oracle queries. - When both parties can make quantum queries to the random oracle, we introduce a natural conjecture, which if true would imply attacks with poly(d) classical queries to the random oracle. Our conjecture, roughly speaking, states that the multiplication of any two degree-d real-valued polynomials over the Boolean hypercube of influence at most delta = 1/poly (d) is nonzero. We then prove our conjecture for exponentially small influences, which leads to an (unconditional) classical 2(O(md))-query attack on any such key agreement protocol, where m is the oracle's output length. - Since our attacks are classical, we then ask whether it is always possible to find classical attacks on key agreements with imperfect completeness in the quantum random oracle model. We prove a barrier for this approach, by showing that if the folklore "Simulation Conjecture" (first formally stated by Aaronson and Ambainis in 2009) about the possibility of simulating efficient-query quantum algorithms using efficient-query classical algorithms is false, then there is in fact such a secure key agreement in the quantum random oracle model that cannot be broken classically., QC 20221212Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-031-15978-7; 978-3-031-15979-4

When searching for information in a data collection, we are often interested not only in finding relevant items, but also in assembling a diverse set, so as to explore different concepts that are present in the data. This problem has been researched extensively. However, finding a set of items with minimal pairwise similarities can be computationally challenging, and most existing works striving for quality guarantees assume that item relatedness is measured by a distance function. Given the widespread use of similarity functions in many domains, we believe this to be an important gap in the literature. In this paper we study the problem of finding a diverse set of items, when item relatedness is measured by a similarity function. We formulate the diversification task using a flexible, broadly applicable minimization objective, consisting of the sum of pairwise similarities of the selected items and a relevance penalty term. To find good solutions we adopt a randomized rounding strategy, which is challenging to analyze because of the cardinality constraint present in our formulation. Even though this obstacle can be overcome using dependent rounding, we show that it is possible to obtain provably good solutions using an independent approach, which is faster, simpler to implement and completely parallelizable. Our analysis relies on a novel bound for the ratio of Poisson-Binomial densities, which is of independent interest and has potential implications for other combinatorial-optimization problems. We leverage this result to design an efficient randomized algorithm that provides a lower-order additive approximation guarantee. We validate our method using several benchmark datasets, and show that it consistently outperforms the greedy approaches that are commonly used in the literature., QC 20220930

Decision trees are popular classification models, providing high accuracy and intuitive explanations. However, as the tree size grows the model interpretability deteriorates. Traditional tree-induction algorithms, such as C4.5 and CART, rely on impurity-reduction functions that promote the discriminative power of each split. Thus, although these traditional methods are accurate in practice, there has been no theoretical guarantee that they will produce small trees. In this paper, we justify the use of a general family of impurity functions, including the popular functions of entropy and Gini-index, in scenarios where small trees are desirable, by showing that a simple enhancement can equip them with complexity guarantees. We consider a general setting, where objects to be classified are drawn from an arbitrary probability distribution, classification can be binary or multi-class, and splitting tests are associated with non-uniform costs. As a measure of tree complexity, we adopt the expected cost to classify an object drawn from the input distribution, which, in the uniform-cost case, is the expected number of tests. We propose a tree-induction algorithm that gives a logarithmic approximation guarantee on the tree complexity. This approximation factor is tight up to a constant factor under mild assumptions. The algorithm recursively selects a test that maximizes a greedy criterion defined as a weighted sum of three components. The first two components encourage the selection of tests that improve the balance and the cost-efficiency of the tree, respectively, while the third impurity-reduction component encourages the selection of more discriminative tests. As shown in our empirical evaluation, compared to the original heuristics, the enhanced algorithms strike an excellent balance between predictive accuracy and tree complexity., QC 20221214

The security of Cloud applications is always a major concern for application developers and operators. Protecting their users' data confidentiality requires methods to avoid leakage from vulnerable software and unreliable cloud providers. Recently, hardware-based technologies emerged in the Cloud setting to isolate applications from the privileged access of cloud providers. One of those technologies is the Separation Kernel which aims at isolating safely the software components of applications. In this article, we propose a declarative methodology supported by a running prototype to determine the partitioning of a Cloud multi-component application in order to allow its placement on a Separation Kernel. We employ information-flow security techniques to determine how to partition the application, and showcase the methodology and prototype over a motivating scenario from an IoT application deployed to a central Cloud., QC 20221111Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-3-031-04718-3; 978-3-031-04717-6

Ensuring the consistent usage of formatting conventions is an important aspect of modern software quality assurance. To do so, the source code of a project should be checked against the formatting conventions (or rules) adopted by its development team, and then the detected violations should be repaired if any. While the former task can be automatically done by format checkers implemented in linters, there is no satisfactory solution for the latter. Manually fixing formatting convention violations is a waste of developer time and code formatters do not take into account the conventions adopted and configured by developers for the used linter. In this paper, we present Styler, a tool dedicated to fixing formatting rule violations raised by format checkers using a machine learning approach. For a given project, Styler first generates training data by injecting violations of the project-specific rules in violation-free source code files. Then, it learns fixes by feeding long short-term memory neural networks with the training data encoded into token sequences. Finally, it predicts fixes for real formatting violations with the trained models. Currently, Styler supports a single checker, Checkstyle, which is a highly configurable and popular format checker for Java. In an empirical evaluation, Styler repaired 41% of 26,791 Checkstyle violations mined from 104 GitHub projects. Moreover, we compared Styler with the IntelliJ plugin CheckStyle-IDEA and the machine-learning-based code formatters Naturalize and CodeBuff. We found out that Styler fixes violations of a diverse set of Checkstyle rules (24/25 rules), generates smaller repairs in comparison to the other systems, and predicts repairs in seconds once trained on a project. Through a manual analysis, we identified cases in which Styler does not succeed to generate correct repairs, which can guide further improvements in Styler. Finally, the results suggest that Styler can be useful to help developers repair Checkstyle, QC 20221101

This white paper presents the vision of a novel methodology for developing safety-critical software, which is inspired by late developments in learning based co-piloting of implementations. The methodology, called TriCo, integrates formal methods with learning based approaches to co-pilot the agile, simultaneous development of three artefacts: implementation, specification, and tests. Whenever the user changes any of these, a TriCo empowered IDE would suggest changes to the other two artefacts in such a way that the three are kept consistent. The user has the final word on whether the changes are accepted, rejected, or modified. In the latter case, consistency will be checked again and re-established. We discuss the emerging trends which put the community in a good position to realise this vision, describe the methodology and workflow, as well as challenges and possible solutions for the realisation of TriCo., QC 20230622

In deductive verification and software model checking, dealing with certain specification language constructs can be problematic when the back-end solver is not sufficiently powerful or lacks the required theories. One way to deal with this is to transform, for verification purposes, the program to an equivalent one not using the problematic constructs, and to reason about its correctness instead. In this paper, we propose instrumentation as a unifying verification paradigm that subsumes various existing ad-hoc approaches, has a clear formal correctness criterion, can be applied automatically, and can transfer back witnesses and counterexamples. We illustrate our approach on the automated verification of programs that involve quantification and aggregation operations over arrays, such as the maximum value or sum of the elements in a given segment of the array, which are known to be difficult to reason about automatically. We implement our approach in the MonoCera tool, which is tailored to the verification of programs with aggregation, and evaluate it on example programs, including SV-COMP programs., Part of ISBN 9783031377082QC 20230919

In embedded systems development, contract based design is a design paradigm where a system is divided hierarchically into components and developed in a top-down manner, using contracts as a means to divide responsibilities and manage the complexity of the system. Contract theories provide a formal basis for reasoning about the properties of the system, and of the contracts themselves. In previous work, we have developed a contract theory for sequential, procedural programs, that is defined abstractly, at the semantic level. The theory fulfils well-established, desired properties of system design. In this paper, we present a methodology for applying the contract theory in real embedded software design. We show how to instantiate the contract theory with concrete syntaxes for defining components and contracts, and how the contract theory enables formal reasoning about the resulting objects. In order to cope with the need for different behavioural models at different levels of abstraction in an embedded system, we extend the contract theory through parametrisation on the semantic domain. We illustrate the application of the proposed methodology on a small, but realistic example, where the temporal logic TLA is used for reasoning at the system level, while lower level components are specified using pre- and post-conditions in the form of ACSL, a specification language for C., Part of ISBN 9783031352560QC 20230821

Identification and classification of cell-graph features using graph-neural networks (GNNs) has been shown to be useful in digital pathology. In this work, we consider the role of edge labels in cell-graph modeling, including histological modeling techniques, edge aggregation in GNN architectures, and edge label prediction. We propose EAGNN (Edge Aggregated GNN), a new GNN model that aggregates both node and edge label information to take advantage of topological information about cellular data and facilitate edge label prediction. We introduce new edge label features that improve histological modeling and prediction. We evaluate our EAGNN model for the task of detecting the presence and location of the basement membrane in oral mucosal tissue, as a proof-of-concept application., Part of ISBN 9783031340475QC 20230823