---
_id: '14317'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "Markov decision processes can be viewed as transformers of probability distributions.
    While this view is useful from a practical standpoint to reason about trajectories
    of distributions, basic reachability and safety problems are known to be computationally
    intractable (i.e., Skolem-hard) to solve in such models. Further, we show that
    even for simple examples of MDPs, strategies for safety objectives over distributions
    can require infinite memory and randomization.\r\nIn light of this, we present
    a novel overapproximation approach to synthesize strategies in an MDP, such that
    a safety objective over the distributions is met. More precisely, we develop a
    new framework for template-based synthesis of certificates as affine distributional
    and inductive invariants for safety objectives in MDPs. We provide two algorithms
    within this framework. One can only synthesize memoryless strategies, but has
    relative completeness guarantees, while the other can synthesize general strategies.
    The runtime complexity of both algorithms is in PSPACE. We implement these algorithms
    and show that they can solve several non-trivial examples."
acknowledgement: This work was supported in part by the ERC CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt)
  and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385 as well as DST/CEFIPRA/INRIA project
  EQuaVE and SERB Matrices grant MTR/2018/00074.
alternative_title:
- LNCS
article_processing_charge: Yes (in subscription journal)
author:
- first_name: S.
  full_name: Akshay, S.
  last_name: Akshay
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Tobias
  full_name: Meggendorfer, Tobias
  id: b21b0c15-30a2-11eb-80dc-f13ca25802e1
  last_name: Meggendorfer
  orcid: 0000-0002-1712-2165
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Akshay S, Chatterjee K, Meggendorfer T, Zikelic D. MDPs as distribution transformers:
    Affine invariant synthesis for safety objectives. In: <i>International Conference
    on Computer Aided Verification</i>. Vol 13966. Springer Nature; 2023:86-112. doi:<a
    href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5">10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5</a>'
  apa: 'Akshay, S., Chatterjee, K., Meggendorfer, T., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2023). MDPs
    as distribution transformers: Affine invariant synthesis for safety objectives.
    In <i>International Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i> (Vol. 13966,
    pp. 86–112). Paris, France: Springer Nature. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5</a>'
  chicago: 'Akshay, S., Krishnendu Chatterjee, Tobias Meggendorfer, and Dorde Zikelic.
    “MDPs as Distribution Transformers: Affine Invariant Synthesis for Safety Objectives.”
    In <i>International Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>, 13966:86–112.
    Springer Nature, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5</a>.'
  ieee: 'S. Akshay, K. Chatterjee, T. Meggendorfer, and D. Zikelic, “MDPs as distribution
    transformers: Affine invariant synthesis for safety objectives,” in <i>International
    Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>, Paris, France, 2023, vol. 13966,
    pp. 86–112.'
  ista: 'Akshay S, Chatterjee K, Meggendorfer T, Zikelic D. 2023. MDPs as distribution
    transformers: Affine invariant synthesis for safety objectives. International
    Conference on Computer Aided Verification. CAV: Computer Aided Verification, LNCS,
    vol. 13966, 86–112.'
  mla: 'Akshay, S., et al. “MDPs as Distribution Transformers: Affine Invariant Synthesis
    for Safety Objectives.” <i>International Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>,
    vol. 13966, Springer Nature, 2023, pp. 86–112, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5">10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5</a>.'
  short: S. Akshay, K. Chatterjee, T. Meggendorfer, D. Zikelic, in:, International
    Conference on Computer Aided Verification, Springer Nature, 2023, pp. 86–112.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-07-22
  location: Paris, France
  name: 'CAV: Computer Aided Verification'
  start_date: 2023-07-17
date_created: 2023-09-10T22:01:12Z
date_published: 2023-07-17T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:56Z
day: '17'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-37709-9_5
ec_funded: 1
file:
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  file_name: 2023_LNCS_Akshay.pdf
  file_size: 531745
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file_date_updated: 2023-09-20T08:46:43Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '     13966'
language:
- iso: eng
month: '07'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 86-112
project:
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
publication: International Conference on Computer Aided Verification
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 1611-3349
  isbn:
  - '9783031377082'
  issn:
  - 0302-9743
publication_status: published
publisher: Springer Nature
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: 'MDPs as distribution transformers: Affine invariant synthesis for safety objectives'
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  short: CC BY (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 13966
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14518'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: We consider bidding games, a class of two-player zero-sum graph games. The
    game proceeds as follows. Both players have bounded budgets. A token is placed
    on a vertex of a graph, in each turn the players simultaneously submit bids, and
    the higher bidder moves the token, where we break bidding ties in favor of Player
    1. Player 1 wins the game iff the token visits a designated target vertex. We
    consider, for the first time, poorman discrete-bidding in which the granularity
    of the bids is restricted and the higher bid is paid to the bank. Previous work
    either did not impose granularity restrictions or considered Richman bidding (bids
    are paid to the opponent). While the latter mechanisms are technically more accessible,
    the former is more appealing from a practical standpoint. Our study focuses on
    threshold budgets, which is the necessary and sufficient initial budget required
    for Player 1 to ensure winning against a given Player 2 budget. We first show
    existence of thresholds. In DAGs, we show that threshold budgets can be approximated
    with error bounds by thresholds under continuous-bidding and that they exhibit
    a periodic behavior. We identify closed-form solutions in special cases. We implement
    and experiment with an algorithm to find threshold budgets.
acknowledgement: This research was supported in part by ISF grant no. 1679/21, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Guy
  full_name: Avni, Guy
  id: 463C8BC2-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Avni
  orcid: 0000-0001-5588-8287
- first_name: Tobias
  full_name: Meggendorfer, Tobias
  id: b21b0c15-30a2-11eb-80dc-f13ca25802e1
  last_name: Meggendorfer
  orcid: 0000-0002-1712-2165
- first_name: Suman
  full_name: Sadhukhan, Suman
  last_name: Sadhukhan
- first_name: Josef
  full_name: Tkadlec, Josef
  id: 3F24CCC8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Tkadlec
  orcid: 0000-0002-1097-9684
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Avni G, Meggendorfer T, Sadhukhan S, Tkadlec J, Zikelic D. Reachability poorman
    discrete-bidding games. In: <i>Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications</i>.
    Vol 372. IOS Press; 2023:141-148. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264">10.3233/FAIA230264</a>'
  apa: 'Avni, G., Meggendorfer, T., Sadhukhan, S., Tkadlec, J., &#38; Zikelic, D.
    (2023). Reachability poorman discrete-bidding games. In <i>Frontiers in Artificial
    Intelligence and Applications</i> (Vol. 372, pp. 141–148). Krakow, Poland: IOS
    Press. <a href="https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264">https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264</a>'
  chicago: Avni, Guy, Tobias Meggendorfer, Suman Sadhukhan, Josef Tkadlec, and Dorde
    Zikelic. “Reachability Poorman Discrete-Bidding Games.” In <i>Frontiers in Artificial
    Intelligence and Applications</i>, 372:141–48. IOS Press, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264">https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264</a>.
  ieee: G. Avni, T. Meggendorfer, S. Sadhukhan, J. Tkadlec, and D. Zikelic, “Reachability
    poorman discrete-bidding games,” in <i>Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and
    Applications</i>, Krakow, Poland, 2023, vol. 372, pp. 141–148.
  ista: 'Avni G, Meggendorfer T, Sadhukhan S, Tkadlec J, Zikelic D. 2023. Reachability
    poorman discrete-bidding games. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.
    ECAI: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence vol. 372, 141–148.'
  mla: Avni, Guy, et al. “Reachability Poorman Discrete-Bidding Games.” <i>Frontiers
    in Artificial Intelligence and Applications</i>, vol. 372, IOS Press, 2023, pp.
    141–48, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230264">10.3233/FAIA230264</a>.
  short: G. Avni, T. Meggendorfer, S. Sadhukhan, J. Tkadlec, D. Zikelic, in:, Frontiers
    in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, 2023, pp. 141–148.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-10-04
  location: Krakow, Poland
  name: 'ECAI: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence'
  start_date: 2023-09-30
date_created: 2023-11-12T23:00:56Z
date_published: 2023-09-28T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:57Z
day: '28'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.3233/FAIA230264
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2307.15218'
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 1390ca38480fa4cf286b0f1a42e8c12f
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: dernst
  date_created: 2023-11-13T10:16:10Z
  date_updated: 2023-11-13T10:16:10Z
  file_id: '14529'
  file_name: 2023_FAIA_Avni.pdf
  file_size: 501011
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2023-11-13T10:16:10Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '       372'
language:
- iso: eng
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
month: '09'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 141-148
project:
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
publication: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9781643684369'
  issn:
  - 0922-6389
publication_status: published
publisher: IOS Press
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Reachability poorman discrete-bidding games
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  short: CC BY-NC (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 372
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14539'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "Stochastic systems provide a formal framework for modelling and quantifying
    uncertainty in systems and have been widely adopted in many application domains.
    Formal\r\nverification and control of finite state stochastic systems, a subfield
    of formal methods\r\nalso known as probabilistic model checking, is well studied.
    In contrast, formal verification and control of infinite state stochastic systems
    have received comparatively\r\nless attention. However, infinite state stochastic
    systems commonly arise in practice.\r\nFor instance, probabilistic models that
    contain continuous probability distributions such\r\nas normal or uniform, or
    stochastic dynamical systems which are a classical model for\r\ncontrol under
    uncertainty, both give rise to infinite state systems.\r\nThe goal of this thesis
    is to contribute to laying theoretical and algorithmic foundations\r\nof fully
    automated formal verification and control of infinite state stochastic systems,\r\nwith
    a particular focus on systems that may be executed over a long or infinite time.\r\nWe
    consider formal verification of infinite state stochastic systems in the setting
    of\r\nstatic analysis of probabilistic programs and formal control in the setting
    of controller\r\nsynthesis in stochastic dynamical systems. For both problems,
    we present some of the\r\nfirst fully automated methods for probabilistic (a.k.a.
    quantitative) reachability and\r\nsafety analysis applicable to infinite time
    horizon systems. We also advance the state\r\nof the art of probability 1 (a.k.a.
    qualitative) reachability analysis for both problems.\r\nFinally, for formal controller
    synthesis in stochastic dynamical systems, we present a\r\nnovel framework for
    learning neural network control policies in stochastic dynamical\r\nsystems with
    formal guarantees on correctness with respect to quantitative reachability,\r\nsafety
    or reach-avoid specifications.\r\n"
alternative_title:
- ISTA Thesis
article_processing_charge: No
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: Zikelic D. Automated verification and control of infinite state stochastic
    systems. 2023. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.15479/14539">10.15479/14539</a>
  apa: Zikelic, D. (2023). <i>Automated verification and control of infinite state
    stochastic systems</i>. Institute of Science and Technology Austria. <a href="https://doi.org/10.15479/14539">https://doi.org/10.15479/14539</a>
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde. “Automated Verification and Control of Infinite State Stochastic
    Systems.” Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.15479/14539">https://doi.org/10.15479/14539</a>.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, “Automated verification and control of infinite state stochastic
    systems,” Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2023.
  ista: Zikelic D. 2023. Automated verification and control of infinite state stochastic
    systems. Institute of Science and Technology Austria.
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde. <i>Automated Verification and Control of Infinite State Stochastic
    Systems</i>. Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2023, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.15479/14539">10.15479/14539</a>.
  short: D. Zikelic, Automated Verification and Control of Infinite State Stochastic
    Systems, Institute of Science and Technology Austria, 2023.
date_created: 2023-11-15T13:39:10Z
date_published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:10Z
day: '15'
ddc:
- '000'
degree_awarded: PhD
department:
- _id: KrCh
- _id: GradSch
doi: 10.15479/14539
ec_funded: 1
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: f23e002b0059ca78e1fbb864da52dd7e
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: cchlebak
  date_created: 2023-11-15T13:43:28Z
  date_updated: 2023-11-15T13:43:28Z
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  file_size: 2116426
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  file_size: 35884057
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file_date_updated: 2023-11-15T13:44:24Z
language:
- iso: eng
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
month: '11'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: '256'
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - 978-3-99078-036-7
  issn:
  - 2663 - 337X
publication_status: published
publisher: Institute of Science and Technology Austria
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '1194'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '12000'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '12511'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '14600'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '14601'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '9644'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
  - id: '10414'
    relation: part_of_dissertation
    status: public
status: public
supervisor:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
title: Automated verification and control of infinite state stochastic systems
tmp:
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    BY-NC-SA 4.0)
  short: CC BY-NC-SA (4.0)
type: dissertation
user_id: 8b945eb4-e2f2-11eb-945a-df72226e66a9
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14559'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: We consider the problem of learning control policies in discrete-time stochastic
    systems which guarantee that the system stabilizes within some specified stabilization
    region with probability 1. Our approach is based on the novel notion of stabilizing
    ranking supermartingales (sRSMs) that we introduce in this work. Our sRSMs overcome
    the limitation of methods proposed in previous works whose applicability is restricted
    to systems in which the stabilizing region cannot be left once entered under any
    control policy. We present a learning procedure that learns a control policy together
    with an sRSM that formally certifies probability 1 stability, both learned as
    neural networks. We show that this procedure can also be adapted to formally verifying
    that, under a given Lipschitz continuous control policy, the stochastic system
    stabilizes within some stabilizing region with probability 1. Our experimental
    evaluation shows that our learning procedure can successfully learn provably stabilizing
    policies in practice.
acknowledgement: This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
alternative_title:
- LNCS
article_processing_charge: No
author:
- first_name: Matin
  full_name: Ansaripour, Matin
  last_name: Ansaripour
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Ansaripour M, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. Learning provably
    stabilizing neural controllers for discrete-time stochastic systems. In: <i>21st
    International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis</i>.
    Vol 14215. Springer Nature; 2023:357-379. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17">10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17</a>'
  apa: 'Ansaripour, M., Chatterjee, K., Henzinger, T. A., Lechner, M., &#38; Zikelic,
    D. (2023). Learning provably stabilizing neural controllers for discrete-time
    stochastic systems. In <i>21st International Symposium on Automated Technology
    for Verification and Analysis</i> (Vol. 14215, pp. 357–379). Singapore, Singapore:
    Springer Nature. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17</a>'
  chicago: Ansaripour, Matin, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Thomas A Henzinger, Mathias Lechner,
    and Dorde Zikelic. “Learning Provably Stabilizing Neural Controllers for Discrete-Time
    Stochastic Systems.” In <i>21st International Symposium on Automated Technology
    for Verification and Analysis</i>, 14215:357–79. Springer Nature, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17</a>.
  ieee: M. Ansaripour, K. Chatterjee, T. A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, and D. Zikelic,
    “Learning provably stabilizing neural controllers for discrete-time stochastic
    systems,” in <i>21st International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification
    and Analysis</i>, Singapore, Singapore, 2023, vol. 14215, pp. 357–379.
  ista: 'Ansaripour M, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. 2023. Learning
    provably stabilizing neural controllers for discrete-time stochastic systems.
    21st International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis.
    ATVA: Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis, LNCS, vol. 14215, 357–379.'
  mla: Ansaripour, Matin, et al. “Learning Provably Stabilizing Neural Controllers
    for Discrete-Time Stochastic Systems.” <i>21st International Symposium on Automated
    Technology for Verification and Analysis</i>, vol. 14215, Springer Nature, 2023,
    pp. 357–79, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17">10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17</a>.
  short: M. Ansaripour, K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, in:,
    21st International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis,
    Springer Nature, 2023, pp. 357–379.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-10-27
  location: Singapore, Singapore
  name: 'ATVA: Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis'
  start_date: 2023-10-24
date_created: 2023-11-19T23:00:56Z
date_published: 2023-10-22T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:59Z
day: '22'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-45329-8_17
ec_funded: 1
intvolume: '     14215'
language:
- iso: eng
month: '10'
oa_version: None
page: 357-379
project:
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: 21st International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification
  and Analysis
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 1611-3349
  isbn:
  - '9783031453281'
  issn:
  - 0302-9743
publication_status: published
publisher: Springer Nature
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Learning provably stabilizing neural controllers for discrete-time stochastic
  systems
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 14215
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14778'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'We consider the almost-sure (a.s.) termination problem for probabilistic
    programs, which are a stochastic extension of classical imperative programs. Lexicographic
    ranking functions provide a sound and practical approach for termination of non-probabilistic
    programs, and their extension to probabilistic programs is achieved via lexicographic
    ranking supermartingales (LexRSMs). However, LexRSMs introduced in the previous
    work have a limitation that impedes their automation: all of their components
    have to be non-negative in all reachable states. This might result in a LexRSM
    not existing even for simple terminating programs. Our contributions are twofold.
    First, we introduce a generalization of LexRSMs that allows for some components
    to be negative. This standard feature of non-probabilistic termination proofs
    was hitherto not known to be sound in the probabilistic setting, as the soundness
    proof requires a careful analysis of the underlying stochastic process. Second,
    we present polynomial-time algorithms using our generalized LexRSMs for proving
    a.s. termination in broad classes of linear-arithmetic programs.'
acknowledgement: This research was partially supported by the ERC CoG (grant no. 863818;
  ForM-SMArt), the Czech Science Foundation (grant no. GA21-24711S), and the European
  Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie
  Grant Agreement No. 665385.
article_number: '11'
article_processing_charge: Yes (via OA deal)
article_type: original
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Ehsan
  full_name: Kafshdar Goharshady, Ehsan
  last_name: Kafshdar Goharshady
- first_name: Petr
  full_name: Novotný, Petr
  id: 3CC3B868-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Novotný
- first_name: Jiří
  full_name: Zárevúcky, Jiří
  last_name: Zárevúcky
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: Chatterjee K, Kafshdar Goharshady E, Novotný P, Zárevúcky J, Zikelic D. On
    lexicographic proof rules for probabilistic termination. <i>Formal Aspects of
    Computing</i>. 2023;35(2). doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391">10.1145/3585391</a>
  apa: Chatterjee, K., Kafshdar Goharshady, E., Novotný, P., Zárevúcky, J., &#38;
    Zikelic, D. (2023). On lexicographic proof rules for probabilistic termination.
    <i>Formal Aspects of Computing</i>. Association for Computing Machinery. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391">https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391</a>
  chicago: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Petr Novotný, Jiří Zárevúcky,
    and Dorde Zikelic. “On Lexicographic Proof Rules for Probabilistic Termination.”
    <i>Formal Aspects of Computing</i>. Association for Computing Machinery, 2023.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391">https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391</a>.
  ieee: K. Chatterjee, E. Kafshdar Goharshady, P. Novotný, J. Zárevúcky, and D. Zikelic,
    “On lexicographic proof rules for probabilistic termination,” <i>Formal Aspects
    of Computing</i>, vol. 35, no. 2. Association for Computing Machinery, 2023.
  ista: Chatterjee K, Kafshdar Goharshady E, Novotný P, Zárevúcky J, Zikelic D. 2023.
    On lexicographic proof rules for probabilistic termination. Formal Aspects of
    Computing. 35(2), 11.
  mla: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “On Lexicographic Proof Rules for Probabilistic
    Termination.” <i>Formal Aspects of Computing</i>, vol. 35, no. 2, 11, Association
    for Computing Machinery, 2023, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3585391">10.1145/3585391</a>.
  short: K. Chatterjee, E. Kafshdar Goharshady, P. Novotný, J. Zárevúcky, D. Zikelic,
    Formal Aspects of Computing 35 (2023).
date_created: 2024-01-10T09:27:43Z
date_published: 2023-06-23T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:10Z
day: '23'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1145/3585391
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2108.02188'
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 3bb133eeb27ec01649a9a36445d952d9
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: dernst
  date_created: 2024-01-16T08:11:24Z
  date_updated: 2024-01-16T08:11:24Z
  file_id: '14804'
  file_name: 2023_FormalAspectsComputing_Chatterjee.pdf
  file_size: 502522
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2024-01-16T08:11:24Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '        35'
issue: '2'
keyword:
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Software
language:
- iso: eng
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Formal Aspects of Computing
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 1433-299X
  issn:
  - 0934-5043
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
quality_controlled: '1'
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '10414'
    relation: earlier_version
    status: public
status: public
title: On lexicographic proof rules for probabilistic termination
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)
  short: CC BY (4.0)
type: journal_article
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 35
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14830'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear
    stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents
    the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and
    generalize stability and safety guarantees, with a tolerable probability threshold
    p in [0,1] over the infinite time horizon. Our method leverages advances in machine
    learning literature and it represents formal certificates as neural networks.
    In particular, we learn a certificate in the form of a reach-avoid supermartingale
    (RASM), a novel notion that we introduce in this work. Our RASMs provide reachability
    and avoidance guarantees by imposing constraints on what can be viewed as a stochastic
    extension of level sets of Lyapunov functions for deterministic systems. Our approach
    solves several important problems -- it can be used to learn a control policy
    from scratch, to verify a reach-avoid specification for a fixed control policy,
    or to fine-tune a pre-trained policy if it does not satisfy the reach-avoid specification.
    We validate our approach on 3 stochastic non-linear reinforcement learning tasks.
acknowledgement: This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
citation:
  ama: 'Zikelic D, Lechner M, Henzinger TA, Chatterjee K. Learning control policies
    for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. In: <i>Proceedings of the
    37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>. Vol 37. Association for the
    Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; 2023:11926-11935. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407">10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407</a>'
  apa: 'Zikelic, D., Lechner, M., Henzinger, T. A., &#38; Chatterjee, K. (2023). Learning
    control policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. In <i>Proceedings
    of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i> (Vol. 37, pp. 11926–11935).
    Washington, DC, United States: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407</a>'
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde, Mathias Lechner, Thomas A Henzinger, and Krishnendu Chatterjee.
    “Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with Reach-Avoid Guarantees.”
    In <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>,
    37:11926–35. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2023.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407</a>.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, T. A. Henzinger, and K. Chatterjee, “Learning control
    policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees,” in <i>Proceedings
    of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>, Washington, DC, United
    States, 2023, vol. 37, no. 10, pp. 11926–11935.
  ista: 'Zikelic D, Lechner M, Henzinger TA, Chatterjee K. 2023. Learning control
    policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. Proceedings of the
    37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI: Conference on Artificial
    Intelligence vol. 37, 11926–11935.'
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde, et al. “Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with
    Reach-Avoid Guarantees.” <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial
    Intelligence</i>, vol. 37, no. 10, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
    Intelligence, 2023, pp. 11926–35, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407">10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407</a>.
  short: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, T.A. Henzinger, K. Chatterjee, in:, Proceedings of
    the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Association for the Advancement
    of Artificial Intelligence, 2023, pp. 11926–11935.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-02-14
  location: Washington, DC, United States
  name: 'AAAI: Conference on Artificial Intelligence'
  start_date: 2023-02-07
date_created: 2024-01-18T07:44:31Z
date_published: 2023-06-26T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:02Z
day: '26'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v37i10.26407
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2210.05308'
intvolume: '        37'
issue: '10'
keyword:
- General Medicine
language:
- iso: eng
month: '06'
oa_version: Preprint
page: 11926-11935
project:
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 2374-3468
  issn:
  - 2159-5399
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
quality_controlled: '1'
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '14600'
    relation: earlier_version
    status: public
status: public
title: Learning control policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 37
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '15023'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: Reinforcement learning has shown promising results in learning neural network
    policies for complicated control tasks. However, the lack of formal guarantees
    about the behavior of such policies remains an impediment to their deployment.
    We propose a novel method for learning a composition of neural network policies
    in stochastic environments, along with a formal certificate which guarantees that
    a specification over the policy's behavior is satisfied with the desired probability.
    Unlike prior work on verifiable RL, our approach leverages the compositional nature
    of logical specifications provided in SpectRL, to learn over graphs of probabilistic
    reach-avoid specifications. The formal guarantees are provided by learning neural
    network policies together with reach-avoid supermartingales (RASM) for the graph’s
    sub-tasks and then composing them into a global policy. We also derive a tighter
    lower bound compared to previous work on the probability of reach-avoidance implied
    by a RASM, which is required to find a compositional policy with an acceptable
    probabilistic threshold for complex tasks with multiple edge policies. We implement
    a prototype of our approach and evaluate it on a Stochastic Nine Rooms environment.
acknowledgement: "This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093 (VAMOS)
  and the ERC-2020-\r\nCoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt)."
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Abhinav
  full_name: Verma, Abhinav
  id: a235593c-d7fa-11eb-a0c5-b22ca3c66ee6
  last_name: Verma
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
citation:
  ama: 'Zikelic D, Lechner M, Verma A, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. Compositional policy
    learning in stochastic control systems with formal guarantees. In: <i>37th Conference
    on Neural Information Processing Systems</i>. ; 2023.'
  apa: Zikelic, D., Lechner, M., Verma, A., Chatterjee, K., &#38; Henzinger, T. A.
    (2023). Compositional policy learning in stochastic control systems with formal
    guarantees. In <i>37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems</i>.
    New Orleans, LO, United States.
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde, Mathias Lechner, Abhinav Verma, Krishnendu Chatterjee,
    and Thomas A Henzinger. “Compositional Policy Learning in Stochastic Control Systems
    with Formal Guarantees.” In <i>37th Conference on Neural Information Processing
    Systems</i>, 2023.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, A. Verma, K. Chatterjee, and T. A. Henzinger, “Compositional
    policy learning in stochastic control systems with formal guarantees,” in <i>37th
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems</i>, New Orleans, LO, United
    States, 2023.
  ista: 'Zikelic D, Lechner M, Verma A, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. 2023. Compositional
    policy learning in stochastic control systems with formal guarantees. 37th Conference
    on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS: Neural Information Processing
    Systems.'
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde, et al. “Compositional Policy Learning in Stochastic Control
    Systems with Formal Guarantees.” <i>37th Conference on Neural Information Processing
    Systems</i>, 2023.
  short: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, A. Verma, K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, in:, 37th
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-12-16
  location: New Orleans, LO, United States
  name: 'NeurIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems'
  start_date: 2023-12-10
date_created: 2024-02-25T09:23:24Z
date_published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:04Z
day: '15'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2312.01456'
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2312.01456
month: '12'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
publication: 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
publication_status: epub_ahead
quality_controlled: '1'
status: public
title: Compositional policy learning in stochastic control systems with formal guarantees
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '13142'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: Reinforcement learning has received much attention for learning controllers
    of deterministic systems. We consider a learner-verifier framework for stochastic
    control systems and survey recent methods that formally guarantee a conjunction
    of reachability and safety properties. Given a property and a lower bound on the
    probability of the property being satisfied, our framework jointly learns a control
    policy and a formal certificate to ensure the satisfaction of the property with
    a desired probability threshold. Both the control policy and the formal certificate
    are continuous functions from states to reals, which are learned as parameterized
    neural networks. While in the deterministic case, the certificates are invariant
    and barrier functions for safety, or Lyapunov and ranking functions for liveness,
    in the stochastic case the certificates are supermartingales. For certificate
    verification, we use interval arithmetic abstract interpretation to bound the
    expected values of neural network functions.
acknowledgement: This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
alternative_title:
- LNCS
article_processing_charge: No
author:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. A learner-verifier framework
    for neural network controllers and certificates of stochastic systems. In: <i>Tools
    and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems </i>. Vol 13993. Springer
    Nature; 2023:3-25. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1">10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1</a>'
  apa: 'Chatterjee, K., Henzinger, T. A., Lechner, M., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2023). A
    learner-verifier framework for neural network controllers and certificates of
    stochastic systems. In <i>Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis
    of Systems </i> (Vol. 13993, pp. 3–25). Paris, France: Springer Nature. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1</a>'
  chicago: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Thomas A Henzinger, Mathias Lechner, and Dorde
    Zikelic. “A Learner-Verifier Framework for Neural Network Controllers and Certificates
    of Stochastic Systems.” In <i>Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis
    of Systems </i>, 13993:3–25. Springer Nature, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1</a>.
  ieee: K. Chatterjee, T. A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, and D. Zikelic, “A learner-verifier
    framework for neural network controllers and certificates of stochastic systems,”
    in <i>Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems </i>,
    Paris, France, 2023, vol. 13993, pp. 3–25.
  ista: 'Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. 2023. A learner-verifier
    framework for neural network controllers and certificates of stochastic systems.
    Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems . TACAS: Tools
    and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, LNCS, vol. 13993,
    3–25.'
  mla: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “A Learner-Verifier Framework for Neural Network
    Controllers and Certificates of Stochastic Systems.” <i>Tools and Algorithms for
    the Construction and Analysis of Systems </i>, vol. 13993, Springer Nature, 2023,
    pp. 3–25, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1">10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1</a>.
  short: K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, in:, Tools and Algorithms
    for the Construction and Analysis of Systems , Springer Nature, 2023, pp. 3–25.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-04-27
  location: Paris, France
  name: 'TACAS: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems'
  start_date: 2023-04-22
date_created: 2023-06-18T22:00:47Z
date_published: 2023-04-22T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:52Z
day: '22'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrCh
- _id: ToHe
doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_1
ec_funded: 1
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 3d8a8bb24d211bc83360dfc2fd744307
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: dernst
  date_created: 2023-06-19T08:29:30Z
  date_updated: 2023-06-19T08:29:30Z
  file_id: '13150'
  file_name: 2023_LNCS_Chatterjee.pdf
  file_size: 528455
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2023-06-19T08:29:30Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '     13993'
language:
- iso: eng
month: '04'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 3-25
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: 'Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems '
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 1611-3349
  isbn:
  - '9783031308222'
  issn:
  - 0302-9743
publication_status: published
publisher: Springer Nature
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: A learner-verifier framework for neural network controllers and certificates
  of stochastic systems
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)
  short: CC BY (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 13993
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14242'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: We study the problem of training and certifying adversarially robust quantized
    neural networks (QNNs). Quantization is a technique for making neural networks
    more efficient by running them using low-bit integer arithmetic and is therefore
    commonly adopted in industry. Recent work has shown that floating-point neural
    networks that have been verified to be robust can become vulnerable to adversarial
    attacks after quantization, and certification of the quantized representation
    is necessary to guarantee robustness. In this work, we present quantization-aware
    interval bound propagation (QA-IBP), a novel method for training robust QNNs.
    Inspired by advances in robust learning of non-quantized networks, our training
    algorithm computes the gradient of an abstract representation of the actual network.
    Unlike existing approaches, our method can handle the discrete semantics of QNNs.
    Based on QA-IBP, we also develop a complete verification procedure for verifying
    the adversarial robustness of QNNs, which is guaranteed to terminate and produce
    a correct answer. Compared to existing approaches, the key advantage of our verification
    procedure is that it runs entirely on GPU or other accelerator devices. We demonstrate
    experimentally that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods and
    establish the new state-of-the-art for training and certifying the robustness
    of QNNs.
acknowledgement: "This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385. Research
  was sponsored by the United\r\nStates Air Force Research Laboratory and the United
  States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and was accomplished under
  Cooperative Agreement Number FA8750-19-2-\r\n1000. The views and conclusions contained
  in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing
  the official policies, either expressed or implied,\r\nof the United States Air
  Force or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and
  distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright\r\nnotation
  herein. The research was also funded in part by the AI2050 program at Schmidt Futures
  (Grant G-22-63172) and Capgemini SE."
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Daniela
  full_name: Rus, Daniela
  last_name: Rus
citation:
  ama: 'Lechner M, Zikelic D, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Rus D. Quantization-aware
    interval bound propagation for training certifiably robust quantized neural networks.
    In: <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>.
    Vol 37. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; 2023:14964-14973.
    doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747">10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747</a>'
  apa: 'Lechner, M., Zikelic, D., Chatterjee, K., Henzinger, T. A., &#38; Rus, D.
    (2023). Quantization-aware interval bound propagation for training certifiably
    robust quantized neural networks. In <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference
    on Artificial Intelligence</i> (Vol. 37, pp. 14964–14973). Washington, DC, United
    States: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747</a>'
  chicago: Lechner, Mathias, Dorde Zikelic, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Thomas A Henzinger,
    and Daniela Rus. “Quantization-Aware Interval Bound Propagation for Training Certifiably
    Robust Quantized Neural Networks.” In <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference
    on Artificial Intelligence</i>, 37:14964–73. Association for the Advancement of
    Artificial Intelligence, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747</a>.
  ieee: M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, K. Chatterjee, T. A. Henzinger, and D. Rus, “Quantization-aware
    interval bound propagation for training certifiably robust quantized neural networks,”
    in <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>,
    Washington, DC, United States, 2023, vol. 37, no. 12, pp. 14964–14973.
  ista: 'Lechner M, Zikelic D, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA, Rus D. 2023. Quantization-aware
    interval bound propagation for training certifiably robust quantized neural networks.
    Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI: Conference
    on Artificial Intelligence vol. 37, 14964–14973.'
  mla: Lechner, Mathias, et al. “Quantization-Aware Interval Bound Propagation for
    Training Certifiably Robust Quantized Neural Networks.” <i>Proceedings of the
    37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>, vol. 37, no. 12, Association
    for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2023, pp. 14964–73, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747">10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747</a>.
  short: M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, D. Rus, in:, Proceedings
    of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Association for the Advancement
    of Artificial Intelligence, 2023, pp. 14964–14973.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-02-14
  location: Washington, DC, United States
  name: 'AAAI: Conference on Artificial Intelligence'
  start_date: 2023-02-07
date_created: 2023-08-27T22:01:17Z
date_published: 2023-06-26T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:56Z
day: '26'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26747
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2211.16187'
intvolume: '        37'
issue: '12'
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.16187
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
page: 14964-14973
project:
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9781577358800'
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Quantization-aware interval bound propagation for training certifiably robust
  quantized neural networks
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 37
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '14243'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'Two-player zero-sum "graph games" are central in logic, verification, and
    multi-agent systems. The game proceeds by placing a token on a vertex of a graph,
    and allowing the players to move it to produce an infinite path, which determines
    the winner or payoff of the game. Traditionally, the players alternate turns in
    moving the token. In "bidding games", however, the players have budgets and in
    each turn, an auction (bidding) determines which player moves the token. So far,
    bidding games have only been studied as full-information games. In this work we
    initiate the study of partial-information bidding games: we study bidding games
    in which a player''s initial budget is drawn from a known probability distribution.
    We show that while for some bidding mechanisms and objectives, it is straightforward
    to adapt the results from the full-information setting to the partial-information
    setting, for others, the analysis is significantly more challenging, requires
    new techniques, and gives rise to interesting results. Specifically, we study
    games with "mean-payoff" objectives in combination with "poorman" bidding. We
    construct optimal strategies for a partially-informed player who plays against
    a fully-informed adversary. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, the "value" under
    pure strategies does not necessarily exist in such games.'
acknowledgement: This research was supported in part by ISF grant no.1679/21, by the
  ERC CoG 863818 (ForM-SMArt), and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
  innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Guy
  full_name: Avni, Guy
  id: 463C8BC2-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Avni
  orcid: 0000-0001-5588-8287
- first_name: Ismael R
  full_name: Jecker, Ismael R
  id: 85D7C63E-7D5D-11E9-9C0F-98C4E5697425
  last_name: Jecker
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Avni G, Jecker IR, Zikelic D. Bidding graph games with partially-observable
    budgets. In: <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>.
    Vol 37. ; 2023:5464-5471. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679">10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679</a>'
  apa: Avni, G., Jecker, I. R., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2023). Bidding graph games with
    partially-observable budgets. In <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on
    Artificial Intelligence</i> (Vol. 37, pp. 5464–5471). Washington, DC, United States.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679</a>
  chicago: Avni, Guy, Ismael R Jecker, and Dorde Zikelic. “Bidding Graph Games with
    Partially-Observable Budgets.” In <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on
    Artificial Intelligence</i>, 37:5464–71, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679</a>.
  ieee: G. Avni, I. R. Jecker, and D. Zikelic, “Bidding graph games with partially-observable
    budgets,” in <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>,
    Washington, DC, United States, 2023, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 5464–5471.
  ista: 'Avni G, Jecker IR, Zikelic D. 2023. Bidding graph games with partially-observable
    budgets. Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI:
    Conference on Artificial Intelligence vol. 37, 5464–5471.'
  mla: Avni, Guy, et al. “Bidding Graph Games with Partially-Observable Budgets.”
    <i>Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>, vol.
    37, no. 5, 2023, pp. 5464–71, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679">10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679</a>.
  short: G. Avni, I.R. Jecker, D. Zikelic, in:, Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference
    on Artificial Intelligence, 2023, pp. 5464–5471.
conference:
  end_date: 2023-02-14
  location: Washington, DC, United States
  name: 'AAAI: Conference on Artificial Intelligence'
  start_date: 2023-02-07
date_created: 2023-08-27T22:01:18Z
date_published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:56Z
day: '27'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2211.13626'
intvolume: '        37'
issue: '5'
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25679
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 5464-5471
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9781577358800'
publication_status: published
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Bidding graph games with partially-observable budgets
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 37
year: '2023'
...
---
_id: '11459'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'We present a novel approach to differential cost analysis that, given a program
    revision, attempts to statically bound the difference in resource usage, or cost,
    between the two program versions. Differential cost analysis is particularly interesting
    because of the many compelling applications for it, such as detecting resource-use
    regressions at code-review time or proving the absence of certain side-channel
    vulnerabilities. One prior approach to differential cost analysis is to apply
    relational reasoning that conceptually constructs a product program on which one
    can over-approximate the difference in costs between the two program versions.
    However, a significant challenge in any relational approach is effectively aligning
    the program versions to get precise results. In this paper, our key insight is
    that we can avoid the need for and the limitations of program alignment if, instead,
    we bound the difference of two cost-bound summaries rather than directly bounding
    the concrete cost difference. In particular, our method computes a threshold value
    for the maximal difference in cost between two program versions simultaneously
    using two kinds of cost-bound summaries---a potential function that evaluates
    to an upper bound for the cost incurred in the first program and an anti-potential
    function that evaluates to a lower bound for the cost incurred in the second.
    Our method has a number of desirable properties: it can be fully automated, it
    allows optimizing the threshold value on relative cost, it is suitable for programs
    that are not syntactically similar, and it supports non-determinism. We have evaluated
    an implementation of our approach on a number of program pairs collected from
    the literature, and we find that our method computes tight threshold values on
    relative cost in most examples.'
acknowledgement: "We thank Shaun Willows, Thomas Lugnet, and the Living Room Application
  Vending team for suggesting threshold\r\nbounds as a developer-friendly way to interact
  with a differential cost analyzer, and we thank Jim Christy, Daniel\r\nSchoepe,
  and the Prime Video Automated Reasoning team for their support and helpful suggestions
  throughout the\r\nproject. We also thank Michael Emmi for feedback on an earlier
  version of this paper. And finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful
  feedback and Aws Albarghouthi for shepherding the final version of the paper. Ðorđe
  Žikelić was also partially supported by ERC CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt)."
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Bor-Yuh Evan
  full_name: Chang, Bor-Yuh Evan
  last_name: Chang
- first_name: Pauline
  full_name: Bolignano, Pauline
  last_name: Bolignano
- first_name: Franco
  full_name: Raimondi, Franco
  last_name: Raimondi
citation:
  ama: 'Zikelic D, Chang B-YE, Bolignano P, Raimondi F. Differential cost analysis
    with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials. In: <i>Proceedings of the 43rd
    ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>.
    Association for Computing Machinery; 2022:442-457. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435">10.1145/3519939.3523435</a>'
  apa: 'Zikelic, D., Chang, B.-Y. E., Bolignano, P., &#38; Raimondi, F. (2022). Differential
    cost analysis with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials. In <i>Proceedings
    of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design
    and Implementation</i> (pp. 442–457). San Diego, CA, United States: Association
    for Computing Machinery. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435">https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435</a>'
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Pauline Bolignano, and Franco Raimondi.
    “Differential Cost Analysis with Simultaneous Potentials and Anti-Potentials.”
    In <i>Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming
    Language Design and Implementation</i>, 442–57. Association for Computing Machinery,
    2022. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435">https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435</a>.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, B.-Y. E. Chang, P. Bolignano, and F. Raimondi, “Differential cost
    analysis with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials,” in <i>Proceedings
    of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design
    and Implementation</i>, San Diego, CA, United States, 2022, pp. 442–457.
  ista: 'Zikelic D, Chang B-YE, Bolignano P, Raimondi F. 2022. Differential cost analysis
    with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials. Proceedings of the 43rd ACM
    SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.
    PLDI: Programming Language Design and Implementation, 442–457.'
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde, et al. “Differential Cost Analysis with Simultaneous Potentials
    and Anti-Potentials.” <i>Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference
    on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>, Association for Computing
    Machinery, 2022, pp. 442–57, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523435">10.1145/3519939.3523435</a>.
  short: D. Zikelic, B.-Y.E. Chang, P. Bolignano, F. Raimondi, in:, Proceedings of
    the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and
    Implementation, Association for Computing Machinery, 2022, pp. 442–457.
conference:
  end_date: 2022-06-17
  location: San Diego, CA, United States
  name: 'PLDI: Programming Language Design and Implementation'
  start_date: 2022-06-13
date_created: 2022-06-21T09:26:15Z
date_published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:54Z
day: '09'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: GradSch
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1145/3519939.3523435
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2204.00870'
  isi:
  - '000850435600030'
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 7eb915a2ca5b5ce4729321f33b2e16e1
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: dernst
  date_created: 2022-06-27T07:38:21Z
  date_updated: 2022-06-27T07:38:21Z
  file_id: '11466'
  file_name: 2022_PLDI_Zikelic.pdf
  file_size: 318697
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2022-06-27T07:38:21Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
isi: 1
language:
- iso: eng
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 442-457
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
publication: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming
  Language Design and Implementation
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9781450392655'
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Differential cost analysis with simultaneous potentials and anti-potentials
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by_nc_nd.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
    (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
  short: CC BY-NC-ND (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 4359f0d1-fa6c-11eb-b949-802e58b17ae8
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '14600'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear
    stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents
    the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and
    generalize stability and safety guarantees, with a tolerable probability threshold
    $p\in[0,1]$ over the infinite time horizon. Our method leverages advances in machine
    learning literature and it represents formal certificates as neural networks.
    In particular, we learn a certificate in the form of a reach-avoid supermartingale
    (RASM), a novel notion that we introduce in this work. Our RASMs provide reachability
    and avoidance guarantees by imposing constraints on what can be viewed as a stochastic
    extension of level sets of Lyapunov functions for deterministic systems. Our approach
    solves several important problems -- it can be used to learn a control policy
    from scratch, to verify a reach-avoid specification for a fixed control policy,
    or to fine-tune a pre-trained policy if it does not satisfy the reach-avoid specification.
    We validate our approach on $3$ stochastic non-linear reinforcement learning tasks.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
citation:
  ama: Zikelic D, Lechner M, Henzinger TA, Chatterjee K. Learning control policies
    for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. <i>arXiv</i>. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308">10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308</a>
  apa: Zikelic, D., Lechner, M., Henzinger, T. A., &#38; Chatterjee, K. (n.d.). Learning
    control policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. <i>arXiv</i>.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308">https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308</a>
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde, Mathias Lechner, Thomas A Henzinger, and Krishnendu Chatterjee.
    “Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with Reach-Avoid Guarantees.”
    <i>ArXiv</i>, n.d. <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308">https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308</a>.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, T. A. Henzinger, and K. Chatterjee, “Learning control
    policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees,” <i>arXiv</i>. .
  ista: Zikelic D, Lechner M, Henzinger TA, Chatterjee K. Learning control policies
    for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees. arXiv, <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308">10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308</a>.
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde, et al. “Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with
    Reach-Avoid Guarantees.” <i>ArXiv</i>, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308">10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308</a>.
  short: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, T.A. Henzinger, K. Chatterjee, ArXiv (n.d.).
date_created: 2023-11-24T13:10:09Z
date_published: 2022-11-29T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:02Z
day: '29'
department:
- _id: KrCh
- _id: ToHe
doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2210.05308'
language:
- iso: eng
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05308
month: '11'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: arXiv
publication_status: submitted
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '14539'
    relation: dissertation_contains
    status: public
  - id: '14830'
    relation: later_version
    status: public
status: public
title: Learning control policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by_sa.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC
    BY-SA 4.0)
  short: CC BY-SA (4.0)
type: preprint
user_id: 8b945eb4-e2f2-11eb-945a-df72226e66a9
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '14601'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "In this work, we address the problem of learning provably stable neural\r\nnetwork
    policies for stochastic control systems. While recent work has\r\ndemonstrated
    the feasibility of certifying given policies using martingale\r\ntheory, the problem
    of how to learn such policies is little explored. Here, we\r\nstudy the effectiveness
    of jointly learning a policy together with a martingale\r\ncertificate that proves
    its stability using a single learning algorithm. We\r\nobserve that the joint
    optimization problem becomes easily stuck in local\r\nminima when starting from
    a randomly initialized policy. Our results suggest\r\nthat some form of pre-training
    of the policy is required for the joint\r\noptimization to repair and verify the
    policy successfully."
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
citation:
  ama: Zikelic D, Lechner M, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. Learning stabilizing policies
    in stochastic control systems. <i>arXiv</i>. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991">10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991</a>
  apa: Zikelic, D., Lechner, M., Chatterjee, K., &#38; Henzinger, T. A. (n.d.). Learning
    stabilizing policies in stochastic control systems. <i>arXiv</i>. <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991">https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991</a>
  chicago: Zikelic, Dorde, Mathias Lechner, Krishnendu Chatterjee, and Thomas A Henzinger.
    “Learning Stabilizing Policies in Stochastic Control Systems.” <i>ArXiv</i>, n.d.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991">https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991</a>.
  ieee: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, K. Chatterjee, and T. A. Henzinger, “Learning stabilizing
    policies in stochastic control systems,” <i>arXiv</i>. .
  ista: Zikelic D, Lechner M, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. Learning stabilizing policies
    in stochastic control systems. arXiv, <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991">10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991</a>.
  mla: Zikelic, Dorde, et al. “Learning Stabilizing Policies in Stochastic Control
    Systems.” <i>ArXiv</i>, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991">10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991</a>.
  short: D. Zikelic, M. Lechner, K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, ArXiv (n.d.).
date_created: 2023-11-24T13:22:30Z
date_published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:00Z
day: '24'
department:
- _id: KrCh
- _id: ToHe
doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2205.11991'
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11991
month: '05'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
project:
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: arXiv
publication_status: submitted
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '14539'
    relation: dissertation_contains
    status: public
status: public
title: Learning stabilizing policies in stochastic control systems
type: preprint
user_id: 8b945eb4-e2f2-11eb-945a-df72226e66a9
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '12000'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "We consider the quantitative problem of obtaining lower-bounds on the probability
    of termination of a given non-deterministic probabilistic program. Specifically,
    given a non-termination threshold p∈[0,1], we aim for certificates proving that
    the program terminates with probability at least 1−p. The basic idea of our approach
    is to find a terminating stochastic invariant, i.e. a subset SI of program states
    such that (i) the probability of the program ever leaving SI is no more than p,
    and (ii) almost-surely, the program either leaves SI or terminates.\r\n\r\nWhile
    stochastic invariants are already well-known, we provide the first proof that
    the idea above is not only sound, but also complete for quantitative termination
    analysis. We then introduce a novel sound and complete characterization of stochastic
    invariants that enables template-based approaches for easy synthesis of quantitative
    termination certificates, especially in affine or polynomial forms. Finally, by
    combining this idea with the existing martingale-based methods that are relatively
    complete for qualitative termination analysis, we obtain the first automated,
    sound, and relatively complete algorithm for quantitative termination analysis.
    Notably, our completeness guarantees for quantitative termination analysis are
    as strong as the best-known methods for the qualitative variant.\r\n\r\nOur prototype
    implementation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach on various probabilistic
    programs. We also demonstrate that our algorithm certifies lower bounds on termination
    probability for probabilistic programs that are beyond the reach of previous methods."
acknowledgement: This research was partially supported by the ERC CoG 863818 (ForM-SMArt),
  the HKUST-Kaisa Joint Research Institute Project Grant HKJRI3A-055, the HKUST Startup
  Grant R9272 and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
  under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
alternative_title:
- LNCS
article_processing_charge: Yes (in subscription journal)
author:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Amir Kafshdar
  full_name: Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar
  id: 391365CE-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Goharshady
  orcid: 0000-0003-1702-6584
- first_name: Tobias
  full_name: Meggendorfer, Tobias
  id: b21b0c15-30a2-11eb-80dc-f13ca25802e1
  last_name: Meggendorfer
  orcid: 0000-0002-1712-2165
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Chatterjee K, Goharshady AK, Meggendorfer T, Zikelic D. Sound and complete
    certificates for auantitative termination analysis of probabilistic programs.
    In: <i>Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>.
    Vol 13371. Springer; 2022:55-78. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4">10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4</a>'
  apa: 'Chatterjee, K., Goharshady, A. K., Meggendorfer, T., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2022).
    Sound and complete certificates for auantitative termination analysis of probabilistic
    programs. In <i>Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided
    Verification</i> (Vol. 13371, pp. 55–78). Haifa, Israel: Springer. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4</a>'
  chicago: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Tobias Meggendorfer,
    and Dorde Zikelic. “Sound and Complete Certificates for Auantitative Termination
    Analysis of Probabilistic Programs.” In <i>Proceedings of the 34th International
    Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>, 13371:55–78. Springer, 2022. <a
    href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4">https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4</a>.
  ieee: K. Chatterjee, A. K. Goharshady, T. Meggendorfer, and D. Zikelic, “Sound and complete
    certificates for auantitative termination analysis of probabilistic programs,”
    in <i>Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>,
    Haifa, Israel, 2022, vol. 13371, pp. 55–78.
  ista: 'Chatterjee K, Goharshady AK, Meggendorfer T, Zikelic D. 2022. Sound and complete
    certificates for auantitative termination analysis of probabilistic programs.
    Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification.
    CAV: Computer Aided Verification, LNCS, vol. 13371, 55–78.'
  mla: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “Sound and Complete Certificates for Auantitative
    Termination Analysis of Probabilistic Programs.” <i>Proceedings of the 34th International
    Conference on Computer Aided Verification</i>, vol. 13371, Springer, 2022, pp.
    55–78, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4">10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4</a>.
  short: K. Chatterjee, A.K. Goharshady, T. Meggendorfer, D. Zikelic, in:, Proceedings
    of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, Springer,
    2022, pp. 55–78.
conference:
  end_date: 2022-08-10
  location: Haifa, Israel
  name: 'CAV: Computer Aided Verification'
  start_date: 2022-08-07
date_created: 2022-08-28T22:02:02Z
date_published: 2022-08-07T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:58Z
day: '07'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-13185-1_4
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  isi:
  - '000870304500004'
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 24e0f810ec52735a90ade95198bc641d
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: alisjak
  date_created: 2022-08-29T09:17:01Z
  date_updated: 2022-08-29T09:17:01Z
  file_id: '12003'
  file_name: 2022_LNCS_Chatterjee.pdf
  file_size: 505094
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2022-08-29T09:17:01Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '     13371'
isi: 1
language:
- iso: eng
month: '08'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 55-78
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 1611-3349
  isbn:
  - '9783031131844'
  issn:
  - 0302-9743
publication_status: published
publisher: Springer
quality_controlled: '1'
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '14539'
    relation: dissertation_contains
    status: public
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Sound and complete certificates for auantitative termination analysis of probabilistic
  programs
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)
  short: CC BY (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 4359f0d1-fa6c-11eb-b949-802e58b17ae8
volume: 13371
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '12102'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'Given a Markov chain M = (V, v_0, δ), with state space V and a starting state
    v_0, and a probability threshold ε, an ε-core is a subset C of states that is
    left with probability at most ε. More formally, C ⊆ V is an ε-core, iff ℙ[reach
    (V\C)] ≤ ε. Cores have been applied in a wide variety of verification problems
    over Markov chains, Markov decision processes, and probabilistic programs, as
    a means of discarding uninteresting and low-probability parts of a probabilistic
    system and instead being able to focus on the states that are likely to be encountered
    in a real-world run. In this work, we focus on the problem of computing a minimal
    ε-core in a Markov chain. Our contributions include both negative and positive
    results: (i) We show that the decision problem on the existence of an ε-core of
    a given size is NP-complete. This solves an open problem posed in [Jan Kretínský
    and Tobias Meggendorfer, 2020]. We additionally show that the problem remains
    NP-complete even when limited to acyclic Markov chains with bounded maximal vertex
    degree; (ii) We provide a polynomial time algorithm for computing a minimal ε-core
    on Markov chains over control-flow graphs of structured programs. A straightforward
    combination of our algorithm with standard branch prediction techniques allows
    one to apply the idea of cores to find a subset of program lines that are left
    with low probability and then focus any desired static analysis on this core subset.'
acknowledgement: "The research was partially supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants
  Council ECS\r\nProject No. 26208122, ERC CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt), the European Union’s
  Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie
  Grant Agreement No. 665385, HKUST– Kaisa Joint Research Institute Project Grant
  HKJRI3A-055 and HKUST Startup Grant R9272. Ali Ahmadi and Roodabeh Safavi were interns
  at HKUST."
article_number: '29'
article_processing_charge: No
author:
- first_name: Ali
  full_name: Ahmadi, Ali
  last_name: Ahmadi
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Amir Kafshdar
  full_name: Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar
  id: 391365CE-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Goharshady
  orcid: 0000-0003-1702-6584
- first_name: Tobias
  full_name: Meggendorfer, Tobias
  id: b21b0c15-30a2-11eb-80dc-f13ca25802e1
  last_name: Meggendorfer
  orcid: 0000-0002-1712-2165
- first_name: Roodabeh
  full_name: Safavi Hemami, Roodabeh
  id: 72ed2640-8972-11ed-ae7b-f9c81ec75154
  last_name: Safavi Hemami
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Ahmadi A, Chatterjee K, Goharshady AK, Meggendorfer T, Safavi Hemami R, Zikelic
    D. Algorithms and hardness results for computing cores of Markov chains. In: <i>42nd
    IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical
    Computer Science</i>. Vol 250. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik;
    2022. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29">10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29</a>'
  apa: 'Ahmadi, A., Chatterjee, K., Goharshady, A. K., Meggendorfer, T., Safavi Hemami,
    R., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2022). Algorithms and hardness results for computing cores
    of Markov chains. In <i>42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software
    Technology and Theoretical Computer Science</i> (Vol. 250). Madras, India: Schloss
    Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. <a href="https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29">https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29</a>'
  chicago: Ahmadi, Ali, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Tobias Meggendorfer,
    Roodabeh Safavi Hemami, and Dorde Zikelic. “Algorithms and Hardness Results for
    Computing Cores of Markov Chains.” In <i>42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations
    of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science</i>, Vol. 250. Schloss
    Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2022. <a href="https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29">https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29</a>.
  ieee: A. Ahmadi, K. Chatterjee, A. K. Goharshady, T. Meggendorfer, R. Safavi Hemami,
    and D. Zikelic, “Algorithms and hardness results for computing cores of Markov
    chains,” in <i>42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology
    and Theoretical Computer Science</i>, Madras, India, 2022, vol. 250.
  ista: 'Ahmadi A, Chatterjee K, Goharshady AK, Meggendorfer T, Safavi Hemami R, Zikelic
    D. 2022. Algorithms and hardness results for computing cores of Markov chains.
    42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical
    Computer Science. FSTTC: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer
    Science vol. 250, 29.'
  mla: Ahmadi, Ali, et al. “Algorithms and Hardness Results for Computing Cores of
    Markov Chains.” <i>42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology
    and Theoretical Computer Science</i>, vol. 250, 29, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum
    für Informatik, 2022, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29">10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29</a>.
  short: A. Ahmadi, K. Chatterjee, A.K. Goharshady, T. Meggendorfer, R. Safavi Hemami,
    D. Zikelic, in:, 42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology
    and Theoretical Computer Science, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik,
    2022.
conference:
  end_date: 2022-12-20
  location: Madras, India
  name: 'FSTTC: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science'
  start_date: 2022-12-18
date_created: 2023-01-01T23:00:50Z
date_published: 2022-12-14T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:55Z
day: '14'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrCh
- _id: GradSch
doi: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2022.29
ec_funded: 1
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 6660c802489013f034c9e8bd57f4d46e
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: dernst
  date_created: 2023-01-20T10:39:44Z
  date_updated: 2023-01-20T10:39:44Z
  file_id: '12324'
  file_name: 2022_LIPICs_Ahmadi.pdf
  file_size: 872534
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2023-01-20T10:39:44Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '       250'
language:
- iso: eng
month: '12'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: 42nd IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and
  Theoretical Computer Science
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9783959772617'
  issn:
  - 1868-8969
publication_status: published
publisher: Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Algorithms and hardness results for computing cores of Markov chains
tmp:
  image: /images/cc_by.png
  legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
  name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)
  short: CC BY (4.0)
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 250
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '12257'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: Structural balance theory is an established framework for studying social
    relationships of friendship and enmity. These relationships are modeled by a signed
    network whose energy potential measures the level of imbalance, while stochastic
    dynamics drives the network toward a state of minimum energy that captures social
    balance. It is known that this energy landscape has local minima that can trap
    socially aware dynamics, preventing it from reaching balance. Here we first study
    the robustness and attractor properties of these local minima. We show that a
    stochastic process can reach them from an abundance of initial states and that
    some local minima cannot be escaped by mild perturbations of the network. Motivated
    by these anomalies, we introduce best-edge dynamics (BED), a new plausible stochastic
    process. We prove that BED always reaches balance and that it does so fast in
    various interesting settings.
acknowledgement: "K.C. acknowledges support from ERC Start Grant No. (279307: Graph
  Games), ERC Consolidator Grant No. (863818: ForM-SMart), and Austrian Science Fund
  (FWF)\r\nGrants No. P23499-N23 and No. S11407-N23 (RiSE). This project has received
  funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
  under the Marie\r\nSkłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385."
article_number: '034321'
article_processing_charge: No
article_type: original
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Jakub
  full_name: Svoboda, Jakub
  id: 130759D2-D7DD-11E9-87D2-DE0DE6697425
  last_name: Svoboda
  orcid: 0000-0002-1419-3267
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Andreas
  full_name: Pavlogiannis, Andreas
  id: 49704004-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Pavlogiannis
  orcid: 0000-0002-8943-0722
- first_name: Josef
  full_name: Tkadlec, Josef
  id: 3F24CCC8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Tkadlec
  orcid: 0000-0002-1097-9684
citation:
  ama: 'Chatterjee K, Svoboda J, Zikelic D, Pavlogiannis A, Tkadlec J. Social balance
    on networks: Local minima and best-edge dynamics. <i>Physical Review E</i>. 2022;106(3).
    doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321">10.1103/physreve.106.034321</a>'
  apa: 'Chatterjee, K., Svoboda, J., Zikelic, D., Pavlogiannis, A., &#38; Tkadlec,
    J. (2022). Social balance on networks: Local minima and best-edge dynamics. <i>Physical
    Review E</i>. American Physical Society. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321">https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321</a>'
  chicago: 'Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Jakub Svoboda, Dorde Zikelic, Andreas Pavlogiannis,
    and Josef Tkadlec. “Social Balance on Networks: Local Minima and Best-Edge Dynamics.”
    <i>Physical Review E</i>. American Physical Society, 2022. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321">https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321</a>.'
  ieee: 'K. Chatterjee, J. Svoboda, D. Zikelic, A. Pavlogiannis, and J. Tkadlec, “Social
    balance on networks: Local minima and best-edge dynamics,” <i>Physical Review
    E</i>, vol. 106, no. 3. American Physical Society, 2022.'
  ista: 'Chatterjee K, Svoboda J, Zikelic D, Pavlogiannis A, Tkadlec J. 2022. Social
    balance on networks: Local minima and best-edge dynamics. Physical Review E. 106(3),
    034321.'
  mla: 'Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “Social Balance on Networks: Local Minima and
    Best-Edge Dynamics.” <i>Physical Review E</i>, vol. 106, no. 3, 034321, American
    Physical Society, 2022, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.106.034321">10.1103/physreve.106.034321</a>.'
  short: K. Chatterjee, J. Svoboda, D. Zikelic, A. Pavlogiannis, J. Tkadlec, Physical
    Review E 106 (2022).
date_created: 2023-01-16T09:57:57Z
date_published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:49Z
day: '29'
department:
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1103/physreve.106.034321
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2210.02394'
  isi:
  - '000870243100001'
intvolume: '       106'
isi: 1
issue: '3'
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.02394
month: '09'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
project:
- _id: 2581B60A-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: FP7
  grant_number: '279307'
  name: 'Quantitative Graph Games: Theory and Applications'
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2584A770-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: FWF
  grant_number: P 23499-N23
  name: Modern Graph Algorithmic Techniques in Formal Verification
- _id: 25863FF4-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: FWF
  grant_number: S11407
  name: Game Theory
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Physical Review E
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 2470-0053
  issn:
  - 2470-0045
publication_status: published
publisher: American Physical Society
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: 'Social balance on networks: Local minima and best-edge dynamics'
type: journal_article
user_id: 4359f0d1-fa6c-11eb-b949-802e58b17ae8
volume: 106
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '12511'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "We consider the problem of formally verifying almost-sure (a.s.) asymptotic
    stability in discrete-time nonlinear stochastic control systems. While verifying
    stability in deterministic control systems is extensively studied in the literature,
    verifying stability in stochastic control systems is an open problem. The few
    existing works on this topic either consider only specialized forms of stochasticity
    or make restrictive assumptions on the system, rendering them inapplicable to
    learning algorithms with neural network policies. \r\n In this work, we present
    an approach for general nonlinear stochastic control problems with two novel aspects:
    (a) instead of classical stochastic extensions of Lyapunov functions, we use ranking
    supermartingales (RSMs) to certify a.s. asymptotic stability, and (b) we present
    a method for learning neural network RSMs. \r\n We prove that our approach guarantees
    a.s. asymptotic stability of the system and\r\n provides the first method to obtain
    bounds on the stabilization time, which stochastic Lyapunov functions do not.\r\n
    Finally, we validate our approach experimentally on a set of nonlinear stochastic
    reinforcement learning environments with neural network policies."
acknowledgement: "This work was supported in part by the ERC-2020-AdG 101020093, ERC
  CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
  programme\r\nunder the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385."
article_processing_charge: No
article_type: original
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
citation:
  ama: Lechner M, Zikelic D, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. Stability verification in
    stochastic control systems via neural network supermartingales. <i>Proceedings
    of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>. 2022;36(7):7326-7336. doi:<a
    href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695">10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695</a>
  apa: Lechner, M., Zikelic, D., Chatterjee, K., &#38; Henzinger, T. A. (2022). Stability
    verification in stochastic control systems via neural network supermartingales.
    <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>. Association
    for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695</a>
  chicago: Lechner, Mathias, Dorde Zikelic, Krishnendu Chatterjee, and Thomas A Henzinger.
    “Stability Verification in Stochastic Control Systems via Neural Network Supermartingales.”
    <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>. Association
    for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2022. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695">https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695</a>.
  ieee: M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, K. Chatterjee, and T. A. Henzinger, “Stability verification
    in stochastic control systems via neural network supermartingales,” <i>Proceedings
    of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>, vol. 36, no. 7. Association
    for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 7326–7336, 2022.
  ista: Lechner M, Zikelic D, Chatterjee K, Henzinger TA. 2022. Stability verification
    in stochastic control systems via neural network supermartingales. Proceedings
    of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 36(7), 7326–7336.
  mla: Lechner, Mathias, et al. “Stability Verification in Stochastic Control Systems
    via Neural Network Supermartingales.” <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on
    Artificial Intelligence</i>, vol. 36, no. 7, Association for the Advancement of
    Artificial Intelligence, 2022, pp. 7326–36, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695">10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695</a>.
  short: M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, K. Chatterjee, T.A. Henzinger, Proceedings of the
    AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 36 (2022) 7326–7336.
date_created: 2023-02-05T17:29:50Z
date_published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:09:58Z
day: '28'
department:
- _id: ToHe
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1609/aaai.v36i7.20695
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2112.09495'
intvolume: '        36'
issue: '7'
keyword:
- General Medicine
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09495
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
page: 7326-7336
project:
- _id: 62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '101020093'
  name: Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
publication: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 2374-3468
  isbn:
  - '9781577358350'
  issn:
  - 2159-5399
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
quality_controlled: '1'
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '14539'
    relation: dissertation_contains
    status: public
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Stability verification in stochastic control systems via neural network supermartingales
type: journal_article
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 36
year: '2022'
...
---
_id: '10665'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: "Formal verification of neural networks is an active topic of research, and
    recent advances have significantly increased the size of the networks that verification
    tools can handle. However, most methods are designed for verification of an idealized
    model of the actual network which works over real arithmetic and ignores rounding
    imprecisions. This idealization is in stark contrast to network quantization,
    which is a technique that trades numerical precision for computational efficiency
    and is, therefore, often applied in practice. Neglecting rounding errors of such
    low-bit quantized neural networks has been shown to lead to wrong conclusions
    about the network’s correctness. Thus, the desired approach for verifying quantized
    neural networks would be one that takes these rounding errors\r\ninto account.
    In this paper, we show that verifying the bitexact implementation of quantized
    neural networks with bitvector specifications is PSPACE-hard, even though verifying
    idealized real-valued networks and satisfiability of bit-vector specifications
    alone are each in NP. Furthermore, we explore several practical heuristics toward
    closing the complexity gap between idealized and bit-exact verification. In particular,
    we propose three techniques for making SMT-based verification of quantized neural
    networks more scalable. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods
    allow a speedup of up to three orders of magnitude over existing approaches."
acknowledgement: "This research was supported in part by the Austrian Science Fund
  (FWF) under grant Z211-N23 (Wittgenstein\r\nAward), ERC CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt),
  and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.\r\n"
alternative_title:
- Technical Tracks
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Thomas A
  full_name: Henzinger, Thomas A
  id: 40876CD8-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Henzinger
  orcid: 0000-0002-2985-7724
- first_name: Mathias
  full_name: Lechner, Mathias
  id: 3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Lechner
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. Scalable verification of quantized neural
    networks. In: <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>.
    Vol 35. AAAI Press; 2021:3787-3795.'
  apa: 'Henzinger, T. A., Lechner, M., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2021). Scalable verification
    of quantized neural networks. In <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial
    Intelligence</i> (Vol. 35, pp. 3787–3795). Virtual: AAAI Press.'
  chicago: Henzinger, Thomas A, Mathias Lechner, and Dorde Zikelic. “Scalable Verification
    of Quantized Neural Networks.” In <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial
    Intelligence</i>, 35:3787–95. AAAI Press, 2021.
  ieee: T. A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, and D. Zikelic, “Scalable verification of quantized
    neural networks,” in <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>,
    Virtual, 2021, vol. 35, no. 5A, pp. 3787–3795.
  ista: 'Henzinger TA, Lechner M, Zikelic D. 2021. Scalable verification of quantized
    neural networks. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
    AAAI: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Technical Tracks,
    vol. 35, 3787–3795.'
  mla: Henzinger, Thomas A., et al. “Scalable Verification of Quantized Neural Networks.”
    <i>Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence</i>, vol. 35,
    no. 5A, AAAI Press, 2021, pp. 3787–95.
  short: T.A. Henzinger, M. Lechner, D. Zikelic, in:, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference
    on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, 2021, pp. 3787–3795.
conference:
  end_date: 2021-02-09
  location: Virtual
  name: 'AAAI: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence'
  start_date: 2021-02-02
date_created: 2022-01-25T15:15:02Z
date_published: 2021-05-28T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:11Z
day: '28'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: GradSch
- _id: ToHe
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2012.08185'
file:
- access_level: open_access
  checksum: 2bc8155b2526a70fba5b7301bc89dbd1
  content_type: application/pdf
  creator: mlechner
  date_created: 2022-01-26T07:41:16Z
  date_updated: 2022-01-26T07:41:16Z
  file_id: '10684'
  file_name: 16496-Article Text-19990-1-2-20210518 (1).pdf
  file_size: 137235
  relation: main_file
  success: 1
file_date_updated: 2022-01-26T07:41:16Z
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: '        35'
issue: 5A
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/16496
month: '05'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
page: 3787-3795
project:
- _id: 2564DBCA-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '665385'
  name: International IST Doctoral Program
- _id: 25F42A32-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425
  call_identifier: FWF
  grant_number: Z211
  name: The Wittgenstein Prize
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
publication: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
publication_identifier:
  eissn:
  - 2374-3468
  isbn:
  - 978-1-57735-866-4
  issn:
  - 2159-5399
publication_status: published
publisher: AAAI Press
quality_controlled: '1'
related_material:
  record:
  - id: '11362'
    relation: dissertation_contains
    status: public
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Scalable verification of quantized neural networks
type: conference
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 35
year: '2021'
...
---
_id: '10694'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'In a two-player zero-sum graph game the players move a token throughout a
    graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the
    game. Traditionally, the players alternate turns in moving the token. In bidding
    games, however, the players have budgets, and in each turn, we hold an “auction”
    (bidding) to determine which player moves the token: both players simultaneously
    submit bids and the higher bidder moves the token. The bidding mechanisms differ
    in their payment schemes. Bidding games were largely studied with variants of
    first-price bidding in which only the higher bidder pays his bid. We focus on
    all-pay bidding, where both players pay their bids. Finite-duration all-pay bidding
    games were studied and shown to be technically more challenging than their first-price
    counterparts. We study for the first time, infinite-duration all-pay bidding games.
    Our most interesting results are for mean-payoff objectives: we portray a complete
    picture for games played on strongly-connected graphs. We study both pure (deterministic)
    and mixed (probabilistic) strategies and completely characterize the optimal and
    almost-sure (with probability 1) payoffs the players can respectively guarantee.
    We show that mean-payoff games under all-pay bidding exhibit the intriguing mathematical
    properties of their first-price counterparts; namely, an equivalence with random-turn
    games in which in each turn, the player who moves is selected according to a (biased)
    coin toss. The equivalences for all-pay bidding are more intricate and unexpected
    than for first-price bidding.'
acknowledgement: This research was supported in part by the Austrian Science Fund
  (FWF) under grant Z211-N23 (Wittgenstein Award), ERC CoG 863818 (FoRM-SMArt), and
  by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665385.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Guy
  full_name: Avni, Guy
  id: 463C8BC2-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Avni
  orcid: 0000-0001-5588-8287
- first_name: Ismael R
  full_name: Jecker, Ismael R
  id: 85D7C63E-7D5D-11E9-9C0F-98C4E5697425
  last_name: Jecker
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Avni G, Jecker IR, Zikelic D. Infinite-duration all-pay bidding games. In:
    Marx D, ed. <i>Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms</i>.
    Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; 2021:617-636. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38">10.1137/1.9781611976465.38</a>'
  apa: 'Avni, G., Jecker, I. R., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2021). Infinite-duration all-pay
    bidding games. In D. Marx (Ed.), <i>Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium
    on Discrete Algorithms</i> (pp. 617–636). Virtual: Society for Industrial and
    Applied Mathematics. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38">https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38</a>'
  chicago: Avni, Guy, Ismael R Jecker, and Dorde Zikelic. “Infinite-Duration All-Pay
    Bidding Games.” In <i>Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms</i>,
    edited by Dániel Marx, 617–36. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics,
    2021. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38">https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38</a>.
  ieee: G. Avni, I. R. Jecker, and D. Zikelic, “Infinite-duration all-pay bidding
    games,” in <i>Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms</i>,
    Virtual, 2021, pp. 617–636.
  ista: 'Avni G, Jecker IR, Zikelic D. 2021. Infinite-duration all-pay bidding games.
    Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. SODA: Symposium
    on Discrete Algorithms, 617–636.'
  mla: Avni, Guy, et al. “Infinite-Duration All-Pay Bidding Games.” <i>Proceedings
    of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms</i>, edited by Dániel Marx,
    Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2021, pp. 617–36, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.38">10.1137/1.9781611976465.38</a>.
  short: G. Avni, I.R. Jecker, D. Zikelic, in:, D. Marx (Ed.), Proceedings of the
    2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, Society for Industrial and Applied
    Mathematics, 2021, pp. 617–636.
conference:
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  location: Virtual
  name: 'SODA: Symposium on Discrete Algorithms'
  start_date: 2021-01-10
date_created: 2022-01-27T12:11:23Z
date_published: 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:12Z
day: '01'
department:
- _id: GradSch
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1137/1.9781611976465.38
ec_funded: 1
editor:
- first_name: Dániel
  full_name: Marx, Dániel
  last_name: Marx
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2005.06636'
language:
- iso: eng
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  url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06636
month: '01'
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publication: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - 978-1-61197-646-5
publication_status: published
publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
quality_controlled: '1'
scopus_import: '1'
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title: Infinite-duration all-pay bidding games
type: conference
user_id: 8b945eb4-e2f2-11eb-945a-df72226e66a9
year: '2021'
...
---
_id: '9644'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'We present a new approach to proving non-termination of non-deterministic
    integer programs. Our technique is rather simple but efficient. It relies on a
    purely syntactic reversal of the program''s transition system followed by a constraint-based
    invariant synthesis with constraints coming from both the original and the reversed
    transition system. The latter task is performed by a simple call to an off-the-shelf
    SMT-solver, which allows us to leverage the latest advances in SMT-solving. Moreover,
    our method offers a combination of features not present (as a whole) in previous
    approaches: it handles programs with non-determinism, provides relative completeness
    guarantees and supports programs with polynomial arithmetic. The experiments performed
    with our prototype tool RevTerm show that our approach, despite its simplicity
    and stronger theoretical guarantees, is at least on par with the state-of-the-art
    tools, often achieving a non-trivial improvement under a proper configuration
    of its parameters.'
acknowledgement: We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This
  research was partially supported by the ERCCoG 863818 (ForM-SMArt) and the Czech
  Science Foundation grant No. GJ19-15134Y.
article_processing_charge: No
arxiv: 1
author:
- first_name: Krishnendu
  full_name: Chatterjee, Krishnendu
  id: 2E5DCA20-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Chatterjee
  orcid: 0000-0002-4561-241X
- first_name: Ehsan Kafshdar
  full_name: Goharshady, Ehsan Kafshdar
  last_name: Goharshady
- first_name: Petr
  full_name: Novotný, Petr
  id: 3CC3B868-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Novotný
- first_name: Dorde
  full_name: Zikelic, Dorde
  id: 294AA7A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
  last_name: Zikelic
  orcid: 0000-0002-4681-1699
citation:
  ama: 'Chatterjee K, Goharshady EK, Novotný P, Zikelic D. Proving non-termination
    by program reversal. In: <i>Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International
    Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>. Association
    for Computing Machinery; 2021:1033-1048. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093">10.1145/3453483.3454093</a>'
  apa: 'Chatterjee, K., Goharshady, E. K., Novotný, P., &#38; Zikelic, D. (2021).
    Proving non-termination by program reversal. In <i>Proceedings of the 42nd ACM
    SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>
    (pp. 1033–1048). Online: Association for Computing Machinery. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093">https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093</a>'
  chicago: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Petr Novotný, and Dorde
    Zikelic. “Proving Non-Termination by Program Reversal.” In <i>Proceedings of the
    42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>,
    1033–48. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093">https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093</a>.
  ieee: K. Chatterjee, E. K. Goharshady, P. Novotný, and D. Zikelic, “Proving non-termination
    by program reversal,” in <i>Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International
    Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation</i>, Online, 2021,
    pp. 1033–1048.
  ista: 'Chatterjee K, Goharshady EK, Novotný P, Zikelic D. 2021. Proving non-termination
    by program reversal. Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference
    on Programming Language Design and Implementation. PLDI: Programming Language
    Design and Implementation, 1033–1048.'
  mla: Chatterjee, Krishnendu, et al. “Proving Non-Termination by Program Reversal.”
    <i>Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming
    Language Design and Implementation</i>, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021,
    pp. 1033–48, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454093">10.1145/3453483.3454093</a>.
  short: K. Chatterjee, E.K. Goharshady, P. Novotný, D. Zikelic, in:, Proceedings
    of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design
    and Implementation, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, pp. 1033–1048.
conference:
  end_date: 2021-06-26
  location: Online
  name: 'PLDI: Programming Language Design and Implementation'
  start_date: 2021-06-20
date_created: 2021-07-11T22:01:17Z
date_published: 2021-06-01T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2025-07-14T09:10:06Z
day: '01'
department:
- _id: KrCh
doi: 10.1145/3453483.3454093
ec_funded: 1
external_id:
  arxiv:
  - '2104.01189'
  isi:
  - '000723661700067'
isi: 1
language:
- iso: eng
main_file_link:
- open_access: '1'
  url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01189
month: '06'
oa: 1
oa_version: Preprint
page: 1033-1048
project:
- _id: 0599E47C-7A3F-11EA-A408-12923DDC885E
  call_identifier: H2020
  grant_number: '863818'
  name: 'Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications'
publication: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming
  Language Design and Implementation
publication_identifier:
  isbn:
  - '9781450383912'
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
quality_controlled: '1'
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    status: public
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
title: Proving non-termination by program reversal
type: conference
user_id: 4359f0d1-fa6c-11eb-b949-802e58b17ae8
year: '2021'
...
