Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Specification and Inference of Trace Refinement Relations   Modern software is constantly changing. Researchers and practitioners are
increasingly aware that verification tools can be impactful if they embrace
change through analyses that are compositional and span program versions.
Reasoning about similarities and differences between programs goes back to
Benton, who introduced state-based refinement relations, which were extended by
Yang and others. However, to our knowledge, refinement relations have not been
explored for traces.
  We present a novel theory that allows one to perform compositional reasoning
about the similarities/differences between how fragments of two different
programs behave over time through the use of what we call trace-refinement
relations. We take a reactive view of programs and found Kleene Algebra with
Tests (KAT) [Kozen] to be a natural choice to describe traces since it permits
algebraic reasoning and has built-in composition. Our theory involves a
two-step semantic abstraction from programs to KAT, and then our trace
refinement relations correlate behaviors by (i) categorizing program behaviors
into trace classes through KAT intersection and (ii) correlating atomic
events/conditions across programs with KAT hypotheses. We next describe a
synthesis algorithm that iteratively constructs trace-refinement relations
between two programs by exploring sub-partitions of their traces, iteratively
abstracting them as KAT expressions, discovering relationships through a custom
edit-distance algorithm, and applying strategies (i) and (ii) above. We have
implemented this algorithm as {\sc knotical}, the first tool capable of
synthesizing trace-refinement relations. It built from the ground up in Ocaml,
using InterProc and SymKAT. We have demonstrated that useful relations can be
efficiently generated across a suite of 37 benchmarks that include changing
fragments of array programs, systems code, and web servers.

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The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
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The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
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The categories of this paper are: eess
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The categories of this paper are: hep-th
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The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
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The categories of this paper are: q-fin
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The categories of this paper are: physics
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The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
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The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
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The categories of this paper are: q-bio
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The categories of this paper are: econ
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The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
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The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
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The categories of this paper are: nlin