@inproceedings{32f04c76322a454487bf25370fc49ca6,
title = "First-order quantified separators",
abstract = "Quantified first-order formulas, often with quantifier alternations, are increasingly used in the verification of complex systems. While automated theorem provers for first-order logic are becoming more robust, invariant inference tools that handle quantifiers are currently restricted to purely universal formulas. We define and analyze first-order quantified separators and their application to inferring quantified invariants with alternations. A separator for a given set of positively and negatively labeled structures is a formula that is true on positive structures and false on negative structures. We investigate the problem of finding a separator from the class of formulas in prenex normal form with a bounded number of quantifiers and show this problem is NP-complete by reduction to and from SAT. We also give a practical separation algorithm, which we use to demonstrate the first invariant inference procedure able to infer invariants with quantifier alternations.",
keywords = "First-order logic, Invariant inference",
author = "Koenig, \{Jason R.\} and Oded Padon and Neil Immerman and Alex Aiken",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 ACM.; 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2020 ; Conference date: 15-06-2020 Through 20-06-2020",
year = "2020",
month = jun,
day = "11",
doi = "10.1145/3385412.3386018",
language = "الإنجليزيّة",
series = "Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)",
pages = "703--717",
editor = "Donaldson, \{Alastair F.\} and Emina Torlak",
booktitle = "PLDI 2020 - Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation",
}