Talk "Sound up-to techniques and Complete abstract domains"

by Filippo Bonchi

Sat, 07 July 2018 at 11:10 am in Royal Holloway, United Kingdom

Joint work with: Pierre Ganty, Roberto Giacobazzi and Dusko Pavlovic

Abstract: Abstract interpretation is a method to automatically find invariants of programs or pieces of code whose semantics is given via least fixed points. Up-to techniques have been introduced as enhancements of coinduction, an abstract principle to prove properties expressed as greatest fixed-points. While abstract interpretation is always sound by definition, the soundness of up-to techniques needs some ingenuity to be proven. For completeness, the setting is switched: up-to techniques are always complete, while abstract domains are not. In this work we show that, under reasonable assumptions, there is an evident connection between sound up-to techniques and complete abstract domains.