Representative Research Projects

Below are some of the research projects actively being pursued in my group.  Besides these, there are a number of other currently less developed ideas my students and I are seriously exploring, broadly in the areas of programming language design, program analysis, type systems, protocol and specification inference, testing, and verification. 

Type-Based Verification and Deductive Program Synthesis.

We have an active line of investigation focussed on the application of expressive type systems to facilitate the verification of non-trivial properties of functional programs. We have, for example, enriched refinement types with an underapproximation semantics to enable the verification of completeness properties of sophisticated property-based test generators in OCaml. We have also explored type-based verification of the functional correctness of effectful parser combinator programs, equipping a refinement-type system with an effect system amenable for automated verifcation. In recent work, we have also explored new approaches to component-based deductive synthesis techniques that uses Hoare-style pre- and post-conditions affixed to library methods to guide a specification-aware synthesis search procedure, We've also shown to equip a conflict-driven learning procedure with information that characterizes the nature of these specifications to enable greater scalability and efficiency. Our tool, called Cobalt, has been shown to be highly effective across a number of different domains both with respect to expressivity and scalability.

We have developed a compositional and lightweight dependent type inference system for ML capable of inferring useful safety properties of ML programs that go beyond the kinds of properties expressible using classical Hindley-Milner polymorphic type inference. Our technique infers refinements, requires no programmer annotations or guidance, is context-sensitive, and is not based on a whole-program analysis.

      Representative publications:


Specification, Verification, and Implementation of Weak Consistency and Isolation.


Geo-distributed web applications often favor high availability over strong consistency. In response to this bias, modern-day replicated data stores often eschew sequential consistency in favor of weaker eventual consistency data semantics. While most operations supported by a typical web application can be engineered, with sufficient care, to function under EC, there are oftentimes critical operations that require stronger consistency guarantees. Unfortunately, existing approaches to tunable consistency suffers from poorly-defined implementation-specific semantics, often expressed at a level of abstraction far removed from the application. Programming modern-day distributed systems is thus a complex error-prone endeavor. We have embarked on a number of initiatives in this space that explore new logical formalisms, language design abstractions, and program verification techniques to help specify, define, and reason about applications deployed in these environments. For example, MRDTs are a new programming abstraction that allows the synthesis of any OCaml datatype into a distributed object through the use of three-way merge functions supplied with the type. Q9 is a programming and verification environment for reasoning about distributed OCaml applications that adopts symbolic execution and bounded model checking methods to validate the correctness of geo-replicated OCaml applications with respect to user-specified safety properties. Quelea uses axiomatically-defined contracts to realize a declarative programming model for eventually consistent data stores that abstracts the actual implementation of the data store via high-level programming and system-level models that are agnostic to a specific implementation. By doing so, Quelea frees application programmers from having to reason about their application in terms of low-level implementation specific data store semantics. Instead, programmers can now reason in terms of an abstract model of the data store, and develop applications by defining and composing high-level replicated data types. Acidifier is a rely-guarantee proof system that verifies the correctness of database applications under weak isolation semantics, a semantics that admits behaviors weaker than serializability. CLOTHO is an automated white-box testing framework for weakly-consistent distributed database applications. Atropos is a refactoring tool that automatically transforms database schema to a more efficient representation suitable for weakly-consistent storage systems. We have also explored parameterized verification of classical distributed data structures such as CRDTs using novel proof techniques that are amenable for verification using automated theorem provers, and have also considered new specification and verification methods that allow transplanting algorithms and implementations developed for shared-memory concurrency to a gepo-replicated distributed environment.


      Representative publications:

Data-Driven Specification Inference.


In this line of work, we examine how data, in the form of inputs, traces, observations, and samples, can be used to capture salient aspects of a system. The systems we have considered include sophisticated functional programs that make use of complex heap-allocated data structures, loop intensive C programs, and machine learning pipelines. In all of these instances, we have demonstrated how data-driven techniques can be used to discover deep specifications that are nonetheless amenable to automated verification.

In the software space, our motivation centers around specification inference. Having precise specifications that describe a program's intended behavior is a critical pre-requisite to ensure reliabiity, extensibiity, and maintainability of modern-day software. Generating these specifications manually is a challenging, often unsuccessful, exercise; unfortunately, existing static and dynamic analysis techniques often produce poor quality specifications that are ineffective in aiding program verification tasks to guarantee a program behaves as expected.

We have pursued a recent line of work on automated synthesis of specifications that overcome many of the deficiencies that plague existing specification inference methods. Our main contribution is a formulation of the problem as a sample driven one, in which specifications, represented as terms in a decidable refinement type representation, are discovered from observing a program's sample runs in terms of either program execution paths or input-output values, and automatically verified through the use of expressive refinement type systems. Our approach is realized as a series of inductive synthesis frameworks, which use various logic-based or classification-based learning algorithms to provide sound and precise machine-checked specifications. Experimental results indicate that the learning algorithms are both efficient and effective, capable of automatically producing sophisticated specifications in nontrivial hypothesis domains over a range of complex real-world programs, going well beyond the capabilities of existing solutions.

In related work, we have generalized these approaches to automatic invariant discovery that solves verification conditions described within a CHC system. Using a combination of learning algorithms (support vector machines, decision tree learning, etc.), our solver is able to operate without having to constrain the search space from which an unknown predicate is drawn, or the shape and number of coefficients or variables in a presumed invariant. Integrating the solver within a CEGAR-style verification loop leads to an implementation that outperforms the state-of-the-art on challenging benchmark suites. We have also applied similiar decision-tree learning techniques to solve multi-abduction specification inference tasks. Here, we assume client programs interacting with black-box library methods. Our goal is to verify the client with respect to a safety property. We apply data-driven learning to postulate meaningful specifications that are both consistent with observed tests, but not overfitted to them.

      Representative publications:

Trustworthy Machine Learning Systems.

In the machine learning space, we have considered verification of reinforcement learning (RL) systems where the safety properties of interest are embedded in a specfication, typically given as a set of differential equations or expressed using some form of formal logic such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), and in which the neural network implementing the policy is viewed as a black-box. We have considered verification approaches that use the network's input-output behavior to help construct a safe (deterministic) synthesized program. By framing the problem as an instance of inductive synthesis, we have demonstrated the ability to automatically generate provably sound non-intrusive safety shields that guarantee that the networks trained against an RL policy will never enter an unsafe state. We have also considered fully automated correct-by-construction training methods that integrate abstraction and refinement procedures directly within the training procedure. In recent work, We have extended these ideas to consider issues of robustness, adversarial learning, and applied our techniques to complex problems in multi-agent environments, robotics path-planning, and cyber-physical systems, in both model-based and model-free settings. Our techniques marry techniques from control theory (e.g., Lyupanov methods), program verification, neuro-symbolic reasoning, and multi-agent composition techniques.

      Representative publications:
Verified Compilation and Reasoning for Concurrency.

With colleagues at Cambridge, INRIA, and MPI-SWS, we have built a compiler for ClightTSO, a C-like language for expressing shared-memory concurrency above x86 processors. Our approach defines a TSO (total store order) relaxed-memory semantics for ClightTSO that exposes the processor's memory model for expressing high-performance (potentially racy) code. We have implemented a verifying compiler for the language as an extension to Compcert. We have recently extended this work to consider an alternative definition of the Java Memory Model that is more closely aligned with the semantics of hardware memory models such as TSO and Power. These efforts have also considered the verification of modern runtime services like garbage collectors found in managed high-level languages like Java.

Along with colleagues at Cambridge, and Microsoft Research, we have also explored formal specification and verification techniques for deterministic parallelism. We define a high-level specification that expresses the necessary conditions for correct execution, and examine ways to tie this high-level specification to low-level implementations. We are particularly interested in modular reasoning technique that allow us to reason about program and library correctness without breaking abstraction boundaries. We have recently applied techniques like frame inference and abduction to build program analyses that automatically inject synchronization barriers to enforce determinism in data parallel applications.

      Representative publications:

Abstractions, Compilation, and Runtime Support for High-Level Concurrent Programming.

We are working on a number of topics  related to the design and implementation of scalable concurent and parallel functional programs.   Our research centers around extensions to message-passing dialects of ML (such as CML), software transactions and transactional events, and associated program analyses.  We are also working on runtime infrastructure to build lightweight and efficient parallel and concurrent garbage collectors for ML-like languages.  Much of our implementation effort centers around Multi-MLton, a multicore aware extension of the MLton whole-program optimizing compiler for Standard ML.  In addition, we have an active effort exploring compilation techniques and runtime support for safe futures, a lightweight annotation for expressing deterministic parallelism; we've studied the behavior and analysis of safe futures for both ML as well as Java.

      Representative publications:
Program Analyses for Debugging and Testing Concurrent Programs.

Debugging and testing shared memory concurrent programs is difficult because of complex non-deterministic interactions introduced by scheduler-induced thread interleavings.  We have explored a number of different dynamic analyses to enable efficent debugging, replay, and regression testing of large concurrent C and Java programs.  Our techniques involve analyzing core dumps and execution traces, aligning correct and faulty executions to identify salient sources of divergence that can be used to identify potential faults.

       Representative publications:

Distributed Programming for Graph-Structured Applications.

We investigate linguistic extensions to map/reduce abstractions for programming large-scale distributed systems, with special focus on applications that manipulate large, unstructured graphs. We target real-world graph analysis tasks found in comparative analysis of biological networks as an important case study.

We address the following specific questions: (i) how can highly unstructured graph-based formalisms be cast in the map/reduce framework? (ii) how effectively can these specifications leverage existing map/reduce infrastructure? (iii) how can these abstractions and their execution environments be enhanced to provide the semantic expressiveness necessary for programmability and scalable performance? (iv) how can these analysis tasks be integrated into comprehensive scientific resources usable by the wider applications community? Answers to these questions entail exploration of linguistic extensions to existing map/reduce abstractions, defining new implementations on wide-area multicore/SMP platforms, and crafting an expressive graph analysis toolkit suitable for realistic deployment in important domains such as systems biology.

          Representative publications: