This paper deals with logics of programs. The objective is to formalize a notion of program description, and to give both plausible (semantic) and effective (syntactic) criteria for the notion of truth of a description. A novel feature of this treatment is the development of the mathematics underlying Floyd-Hoare axiom systems independently of such systems. Other directions that such research might take are considered.

Abstract. We consider a fully SAT-based method of unbounded symbolic model checking based on computing Craig interpolants. In benchmark studies using a set of large industrial circuit verification instances, this method is greatly more efficient than BDD-based symbolic model checking, and compares favorably to some recent SAT-based model checking methods on positive instances. 1

We prove an exponential lower bound on the length of cutting plane proofs. The proof uses an extension of a lower bound for monotone circuits to circuits which compute with real numbers and use nondecreasing functions as gates. The latter result is of independent interest, since, in particular, it implies an exponential lower bound for some arithmetic circuits.

A proof of the (propositional) Craig interpolation theorem for cut-free sequent calculus yields that a sequent with a cut-free proof (or with a proof with cut-formulas of restricted form; in particular, with only analytic cuts) with k inferences has an interpolant whose circuit-size is at most k. We give a new proof of the interpolation theorem based on a communication complexity approach which allows a similar estimate for a larger class of proofs. We derive from it several corollaries: 1. Feasible interpolation theorems for the following proof systems: (a) resolution. (b) a subsystem of LK corresponding to the bounded arithmetic theory S 2 2 (ff). (c) linear equational calculus. (d) cutting planes. 2. New proofs of the exponential lower bounds (for new formulas) (a) for resolution ([15]). (b) for the cutting planes proof system with coefficients written in unary ([4]). 3. An alternative proof of the independence result of [43] concerning the provability of circuit-size lower bounds ...

In this paper we provide algorithms for reasoning with partitions of related logical axioms in propositional and first-order logic (FOL). We also provide a greedy algorithm that automatically decomposes a set of logical axioms into partitions. Our motivation is two-fold. First, we are concerned with how to reason e#ectively with multiple knowledge bases that have overlap in content. Second, we are concerned with improving the e#ciency of reasoning over a set of logical axioms by partitioning the set with respect to some detectable structure, and reasoning over individual partitions. Many of the reasoning procedures we present are based on the idea of passing messages between partitions. We present algorithms for reasoning using forward message-passing and using backward message-passing with partitions of logical axioms. Associated with each partition is a reasoning procedure. We characterize a class of reasoning procedures that ensures completeness and soundness of our message-passing ...

Modica and Rustichini [1994] provided a logic for reasoning about knowledge where agents may be unaware of certain propositions. However, their original approach had the unpleasant property that nontrivial unawareness was incompatible with partitional information structures. More recently, Modica and Rustichini [1999] have provided an approach that allows for nontrivial unawareness in partitional information structures. Here it is shown that their approach can be viewed as a special case of a general approach to unawareness

Filtering denotes any method whereby an agent updates its belief state—its knowledge of the state of the world—from a sequence of actions and observations. In logical filtering, the belief state is a logical formula describing possible world states and the agent has a (possibly nondeterministic) logical model of its environment and sensors. This paper presents efficient logical filtering algorithms that maintain a compact belief state representation indefinitely, for a broad range of environment classes including nondeterministic, partially observable STRIPS environments and environments in which actions permute the state space. Efficient filtering is also possible when the belief state is represented using prime implicates, or when it is approximated by a logically weaker formula. 1

It is well known that interpolation properties of logics underlying specification formalisms play an important role in the study of structured specifications, they have also many other useful logical consequences. In this paper, we solve the interpolation problem for Grothendieck institutions which have recently emerged as an important mathematical structure underlying heterogenous multi-logic specification. Our main result can be used in the applications in several different ways. It can be used to establish interpolation properties for multi-logic Grothendieck institutions, but also to lift interpolation properties from unsorted logics to their many sorted variants. The importance of the latter resides in the fact that, unlike other structural properties of logics, many sorted interpolation is a non-trivial generalisation of unsorted interpolation. The concepts, results, and the applications discussed in this paper are illustrated with several examples from conventional logic and algebraic specification theory.

Motivated by the problem of query answering over multiple structured commonsense theories, we exploit graph-based techniques to improve the efficiency of theorem proving for structured theories. Theories are organized into subtheories that are minimally connected by the literals they share. We present message-passing algorithms that reason over these theories using consequence finding, specializing our algorithms for the case of first-order resolution, and for batch and concurrent theorem proving. We provide an algorithm that restricts the interaction between subtheories by exploiting the polarity of literals. We attempt to minimize the reasoning within each individual partition by exploiting existing algorithms for focused incremental and general consequence finding. Finally, we propose an algorithm that compiles each subtheory into one in a reduced sublanguage. We have proven the soundness and completeness of all of these algorithms. 1

Blast is an automatic verification tool for checking temporal safety properties of C programs. Given a C program and a temporal safety property, Blast either statically proves that the program satisfies the safety property, or provides an execution path that exhibits a violation of the property (or, since the problem is undecidable, does not terminate). Blast constructs, explores, and refines abstractions of the program state space based on lazy predicate abstraction and interpolation-based predicate discovery. This paper gives an introduction to Blast and demonstrates, through two case studies, how it can be applied to program verification and test-case generation. In the first case study, we use Blast to statically prove memory safety for C programs. We use CCured, a type-based memory-safety analyzer, to annotate a program with run-time assertions that check for safe memory operations. Then, we use Blast to remove as many of the run-time checks as possible (by proving that these checks never fail), and to generate execution scenarios that violate the assertions for the remaining run-time checks. In our second case study, we use Blast to automatically generate test suites that guarantee full coverage with respect to a given predicate. Given a C program and a target predicate p, Blast determines the program locations q for which there exists a program execution that reaches q with p true, and automatically generates a set of test vectors that