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Trigger Selection Strategies to Stabilize Program Verifiers
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Pit-Claudel_Trigger Selection.pdf
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609.12 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e41605b7adf80801e8a0a0761ea7d695
Author(s)
Leino, K. Rustan M.
Pit-Claudel, Clement F.
Date Issued
July 2016
Journal
Computer Aided Verification
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Citation
Leino, K. R. M., and Clément Pit-Claudel. “Trigger Selection Strategies to Stabilize Program Verifiers.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 9779, (2016): 361–381.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
SMT-based program verifiers often suffer from the so-called butterfly effect, in which minor modifications to the program source cause significant instabilities in verification times, which in turn may lead to spurious verification failures and a degraded user experience. This paper identifies matching loops (ill-behaved quantifiers causing an SMT solver to repeatedly instantiate a small set of quantified formulas) as a significant contributor to these instabilities, and describes some techniques to detect and prevent them. At their core, the contributed techniques move the trigger selection logic away from the SMT solver and into the high-level verifier: this move allows authors of verifiers to annotate, rewrite, and analyze user-written quantifiers to improve the solver’s performance, using information that is easily available at the source level but would be hard to extract from the heavily encoded terms that the solver works with. The paper demonstrates three core techniques (quantifier splitting, trigger sharing, and matching loop detection) by extending the Dafny verifier with its own trigger selection routine, and demonstrates significant predictability and performance gains on both Dafny’s test suite and large verification efforts using Dafny.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41528-4_20
