# Rupak Majumdar's research while affiliated with Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Kaiserslautern/Saarbruecken and other places

## Publications (330)

Article
The model of asynchronous programming arises in many contexts, from low-level systems software to high-level web programming. We take a language-theoretic perspective and show general decidability and undecidability results for asynchronous programs that capture all known results as well as show decidability of new and important classes. As a main...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper studies formal synthesis of controllers for continuous-space systems with unknown dynamics to satisfy requirements expressed as linear temporal logic formulas. Formal abstraction-based synthesis schemes rely on a precise mathematical model of the system to build a finite abstract model, which is then used to design a controller. The abst...
Preprint
Full-text available
A pushdown vector addition system with states (PVASS) extends the model of vector addition systems with a pushdown store. A PVASS is said to be \emph{bidirected} if every transition (pushing/popping a symbol or modifying a counter) has an accompanying opposite transition that reverses the effect. Bidirectedness arises naturally in many models; it c...
Chapter
We consider turn-based stochastic 2-player games on graphs with ω-regular winning conditions. We provide a direct symbolic algorithm for solving such games when the winning condition is formulated as a Rabin condition. For a stochastic Rabin game with k pairs over a game graph with n vertices, our algorithm runs in O(nk+2k!) symbolic steps, which i...
Preprint
Full-text available
We consider fixpoint algorithms for two-player games on graphs with $\omega$-regular winning conditions, where the environment is constrained by a strong transition fairness assumption. Strong transition fairness is a widely occurring special case of strong fairness, which requires that any execution is strongly fair with respect to a specified set...
Article
Many problems in interprocedural program analysis can be modeled as the context-free language (CFL) reachability problem on graphs and can be solved in cubic time. Despite years of efforts, there are no known truly sub-cubic algorithms for this problem. We study the related certification task: given an instance of CFL reachability, are there small...
Article
Thread pooling is a common programming idiom in which a fixed set of worker threads are maintained to execute tasks concurrently. The workers repeatedly pick tasks and execute them to completion. Each task is sequential, with possibly recursive code, and tasks communicate over shared memory. Executing a task can lead to more new tasks being spawned...
Article
We present a new algorithm to solve the supervisory control problem over non-terminating processes modeled as omega-regular automata. A solution to this problem was obtained by Thistle in 1995 which uses complex manipulations of automata. We show a new solution to the problem through a reduction to obliging games, which, in turn, can be reduced to...
Preprint
Full-text available
Thread pooling is a common programming idiom in which a fixed set of worker threads are maintained to execute tasks concurrently. The workers repeatedly pick tasks and execute them to completion. Each task is sequential, with possibly recursive code, and tasks communicate over shared memory. Executing a task can lead to more new tasks being spawned...
Article
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of constraint solving over strings. A word equation relates two words over string variables and constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the problem of solving word equations...
Preprint
Full-text available
We study the complexity of bidirected reachability problems arising in many areas of program analysis. We formulate the problem abstractly in terms of bidirected valence automata over graph monoids, an algebraic framework that generalizes many models of automata with storage, including CFL-reachability, interleaved Dyck reachability, vector additio...
Conference Paper
When designing or analyzing multi-agent systems, a fundamental problem is responsibility ascription: to specify which agents are responsible for the joint outcome of their behaviors and to which extent. We model strategic multi-agent interaction as an extensive form game of imperfect information and define notions of forward (prospective) and backw...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multiparty session types (MSTs) provide an efficient methodology for specifying and verifying message passing software systems. In the theory of MSTs, a global type specifies the interaction among the roles at the global level. A local specification for each role is generated by projecting from the global type on to the message exchanges it partici...
Preprint
Full-text available
In view of the growing complexity of modern software architectures, formal models are increasingly used to understand why a system works the way it does, opposed to simply verifying that it behaves as intended. This paper surveys approaches to formally explicate the observable behavior of reactive systems. We describe how Halpern and Pearl's notion...
Preprint
Full-text available
When designing or analyzing multi-agent systems, a fundamental problem is responsibility ascription: to specify which agents are responsible for the joint outcome of their behaviors and to which extent. We model strategic multi-agent interaction as an extensive form game of imperfect information and define notions of forward (prospective) and backw...
Article
We consider the problem of responsibility attribution in the setting of parametric Markov chains. Given a family of Markov chains over a set of parameters, and a property, responsibility attribution asks how the difference in the value of the property should be attributed to the parameters when they change from one point in the parameter space to a...
Article
Full-text available
The need to replan arises in many applications. However, in the context of planning as heuristic search, it raises an annoying problem: if the previous plan is still executing, what should the new plan search take as its initial state? If it were possible to accurately predict how long replanning would take, it would be easy to find the appropriate...
Chapter
Full-text available
The model of asynchronous programming arises in many contexts, from low-level systems software to high-level web programming. We take a language-theoretic perspective and show general decidability and undecidability results for asynchronous programs that capture all known results as well as show decidability of new and important classes. As a main...
Chapter
Full-text available
Systematic testing of autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world scenarios is a difficult and expensive problem. We present Paracosm, a framework for writing systematic test scenarios for autonomous driving simulations. Paracosm allows users to programmatically describe complex driving situations with specific features, e.g., road layouts...
Preprint
Many problems in interprocedural program analysis can be modeled as the context-free language (CFL) reachability problem on graphs and can be solved in cubic time. Despite years of efforts, there are no known truly sub-cubic algorithms for this problem. We study the related certification task: given an instance of CFL reachability, are there small...
Preprint
Full-text available
The model of asynchronous programming arises in many contexts, from low-level systems software to high-level web programming. We take a language-theoretic perspective and show general decidability and undecidability results for asynchronous programs that capture all known results as well as show decidability of new and important classes. As a main...
Conference Paper
Preprint
Full-text available
Proof engineering efforts using interactive theorem proving have yielded several impressive projects in software systems and mathematics. A key obstacle to such efforts is the requirement that the domain expert is also an expert in the low-level details in constructing the proof in a theorem prover. In particular, the user needs to select a sequenc...
Preprint
Full-text available
We consider the problem of computing the maximal probability of satisfying an $\omega$-regular specification for stochastic, continuous-state, nonlinear systems evolving in discrete time. The problem reduces, after automata-theoretic constructions, to finding the maximal probability of satisfying a parity condition on a (possibly hybrid) state spac...
Article
We study context-bounded verification of liveness properties of multi-threaded, shared-memory programs, where each thread can spawn additional threads. Our main result shows that context-bounded fair termination is decidable for the model; context-bounded implies that each spawned thread can be context switched a fixed constant number of times. Our...
Article
We consider the controller synthesis problem for stochastic, continuous-state, nonlinear systems against ω-regular specifications. We synthesize a symbolic controller that ensures almost sure (qualitative) satisfaction of the specification. The problem reduces, after some automata-theoretic constructions, to computing the almost sure winning region...
Article
We present a programming model and typing discipline for complex multi-robot coordination programming. Our model encompasses both synchronisation through message passing and continuous-time dynamic motion primitives in physical space. We specify continuous-time motion primitives in an assume-guarantee logic that ensures compatibility of motion prim...
Article
Large scale production distributed systems are difficult to design and test. Correctness must be ensured when processes run asynchronously, at arbitrary rates relative to each other, and in the presence of failures, e.g., process crashes or message losses. These conditions create a huge space of executions that is difficult to explore in a principl...
Article
Motivated by applications in robotics, we consider the task of synthesizing linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications based on examples and natural language descriptions. While LTL is a flexible, expressive, and unambiguous language to describe robotic tasks, it is often challenging for non-expert users. In this paper, we present an interactive me...
Preprint
Full-text available
Dynamic networks of concurrent pushdown systems (DCPS) are a theoretical model for multi-threaded recursive programs with shared global state and dynamical creation of threads. The (global) state reachability problem for DCPS is undecidable in general, but Atig et al. (2009) showed that it becomes decidable, and is in 2EXPSPACE, when each thread is...
Preprint
Full-text available
We study context-bounded verification of liveness properties of multi-threaded, shared-memory programs, where each thread can spawn additional threads. Our main result shows that context-bounded fair termination is decidable for the model; context-bounded implies that each spawned thread can be context switched a fixed constant number of times. Our...
Preprint
Full-text available
Probabilistic bisimulation is a fundamental notion of process equivalence for probabilistic systems. Among others, it has important applications including formalizing the anonymity property of several communication protocols. There is a lot of work on verifying probabilistic bisimulation for finite systems. This is however not the case for paramete...
Article
Distributed reactive synthesis is the problem of algorithmically constructing controllers of distributed, communicating systems so that each closed-loop system satisfies a given temporal specification. We present an algorithm, called negotiation , for sound (but necessarily incomplete) distributed reactive synthesis based on assume–guarantee deco...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present a programming model and typing discipline for complex multi-robot coordination programming. Our model encompasses both synchronisation through message passing and continuous-time dynamic motion primitives in physical space. We specify \emph{continuous-time motion primitives} in an assume-guarantee logic that ensures compatibility of moti...
Preprint
Full-text available
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of constraint solving over strings. A word equation relates two words over string variables and constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the problem of solving word equations...
Preprint
We present a new algorithm to solve the supervisory control problem over non-terminating processes modeled as $\omega$-regular automata. A solution to the problem was obtained by Thistle in 1995 which uses complex manipulations of automata. This algorithm is notoriously hard to understand and, to the best of our knowledge, has never been implemente...
Preprint
We consider the time-bounded reachability problem for continuous-time Markov decision processes. We show that the problem is decidable subject to Schanuel's conjecture. Our decision procedure relies on the structure of optimal policies and the conditional decidability (under Schanuel's conjecture) of the theory of reals extended with exponential an...
Article
Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines, a type of Mealy machines that encode non-Markovian reward functions. We focus on a setting in which this know...
Article
Full-text available
Reactive synthesis and supervisory control theory both provide a design methodology for the automatic and algorithmic design of digital systems from declarative specifications. The reactive synthesis approach originates in computer science, and seeks to synthesise a system that interacts with its environment over time and that, doing so, satisfies...
Preprint
We consider abstraction-based design of output-feedback controllers for dynamical systems with a finite set of inputs and outputs against specifications in linear-time temporal logic. The usual procedure for abstraction-based controller design (ABCD) first constructs a finite-state abstraction of the underlying dynamical system, and second, uses re...
Article
Time-bounded reachability is a fundamental problem in model checking continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) and Markov decision processes (CTMDPs) for specifications in continuous stochastic logics. It can be computed by numerically solving a characteristic linear dynamical system, but the procedure is computationally expensive. We take a control-th...
Preprint
Full-text available
We consider the policy synthesis problem for continuous-state controlled Markov processes evolving in discrete time, when the specification is given as a Büchi condition (visit a set of states infinitely often). We decompose computation of the maximal probability of satisfying the Büchi condition into two steps. The first step is to compute the max...
Article
Full-text available
Distributed and concurrent applications often have subtle bugs that only get exposed under specific schedules. While these schedules may be found by systematic model checking techniques, in practice, model checkers do not scale to large systems. On the other hand, naive random exploration techniques often require a very large number of runs to find...
Article
We propose an optimization for space-efficient implementations of explicit model-predictive controllers (MPC) for robust control of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems on embedded platforms. We obtain an explicit-form robust model-predictive controller as a solution to a multi-parametric linear programming problem. The structure of the controller i...
Chapter
Abstraction-based controller synthesis (ABCS) is a general procedure for automatic synthesis of controllers for continuous-time nonlinear dynamical systems against temporal specifications. ABCS works by first abstracting a time-sampled version of the continuous dynamics of the open-loop system by a symbolic finite state model.
Preprint
Full-text available
Time bounded reachability is a fundamental problem in model checking continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) and Markov decision processes (CTMDPs) for specifications in continuous stochastic logics. It can be computed by numerically solving a characteristic linear dynamical system but the procedure is computationally expensive. We take a control-the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines, i.e., a type of Mealy machine that encodes the reward functions. We focus on a setting in which this knowledg...
Article
We present shrinking horizon model predictive control for discrete-time linear systems under stochastic disturbances with constraints encoded as signal temporal logic (STL) specification. The control objective is to satisfy a given STL specification with high probability against stochastic uncertainties while maximizing the robust satisfaction of a...
Chapter
Probabilistic bisimulation is a fundamental notion of process equivalence for probabilistic systems. It has important applications, including the formalisation of the anonymity property of several communication protocols. While there is a large body of work on verifying probabilistic bisimulation for finite systems, the problem is in general undeci...
Conference Paper
Robotics applications are typically programmed in low-level imperative programming languages, leaving the programmer to deal with dynamic controllers affecting the physical state, geometric constraints on components, and concurrency and synchronization. The combination of these features -dynamics, geometry, and concurrency- makes developing robotic...
Chapter
Many problems in reactive synthesis are stated using two formulas—an environment assumption and a system guarantee—and ask for an implementation that satisfies the guarantee in environments that satisfy their assumption. Reactive synthesis tools often produce strategies that formally satisfy such specifications by actively preventing an environment...
Preprint
Full-text available
We exhibit an algorithm to compute the strongest algebraic (or polynomial) invariants that hold at each location of a given unguarded linear hybrid automaton (i.e., a hybrid automaton having only unguarded transitions, all of whose assignments are given by affine expressions, and all of whose continuous dynamics are given by linear differential equ...
Conference Paper
Linearizability is a key correctness property for concurrent data types. Linearizability requires that the behavior of concurrently invoked operations of the data type be equivalent to the behavior in an execution where each operation takes effect at an instantaneous point of time between its invocation and return. Given an execution trace of opera...
Preprint
Many problems in reactive synthesis are stated using two formulas ---an environment assumption and a system guarantee--- and ask for an implementation that satisfies the guarantee in environments that satisfy their assumption. Reactive synthesis tools often produce strategies that formally satisfy such specifications by actively preventing an envir...
Preprint
Systematic testing of autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world scenarios is a difficult and expensive problem. We present Paracosm, a reactive language for writing test scenarios for autonomous driving systems. Paracosm allows users to programmatically describe complex driving situations with specific visual features, e.g., road layout i...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present a scalable, black box, perception-in-the-loop technique to find adversarial examples for deep neural network classifiers. Black box means that our procedure only has input-output access to the classifier, and not to the internal structure, parameters, or intermediate confidence values. Perception-in-the-loop means that the notion of prox...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present a comprehensive language theoretic causality analysis framework for explaining safety property violations in the setting of concurrent reactive systems. Our framework allows us to uniformly express a number of causality notions studied in the areas of artificial intelligence and formal methods, as well as define new ones that are of pote...
Article
Full-text available
Several recently proposed randomized testing tools for concurrent and distributed systems come with theoretical guarantees on their success. The key to these guarantees is a notion of bug depth—the minimum length of a sequence of events sufficient to expose the bug—and a characterization of d-hitting families of schedules—a set of schedules guarant...
Chapter
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of constraint solving over strings. A word equation relates two words over string variables and constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the problem of solving word equations...
Conference Paper
We present iDeA, an immersive user interface for debugging concurrent actor programs communicating through asynchronous message passing. iDeA is based on the hypothesis that debugging and understanding actor programs is a cognitive task which can be greatly facilitated by the visualization and interaction capabilities of modern immersive environmen...
Article
Full-text available
We present an approach for formal controller synthesis of the Barcelona wastewater system. The goal of the controller is to minimize overflow in the system and to reduce environmental contamination (pollution). Due to the influence of sudden and unpredictable weather changes within the Mediterranean climate, we propose robust model predictive contr...
Preprint
Population protocols (Angluin et al., PODC, 2004) are a formal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions satisfying a strong fairness constraint. A population protocol is well-specified if for every initial configurat...
Chapter
We consider symbolic model checking as a general procedure to compute fixed points on general lattices. We show that this view provides a unified approach for formal reasoning about systems that is applicable to many different classes of systems and properties. Our unified view is based on the notion of region algebras together with appropriate gen...
Preprint
Full-text available
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of constraint solving over strings, which have received a lot of attention in recent years. A word equation relates two words over string variables and constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant strings that equate the left and right hand sides of th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Distributed systems are very complex and in case of errors hard to debug. The high number of messages with non deterministic delivery timings, as well as message losses, data corruption and node crashes cannot be efficiently analyzed with traditional GUI tools. We propose to use immersive technologies in a multi-display environment to tackle these...
Conference Paper
We present multi-layered abstraction-based controller synthesis, which extends standard abstraction-based controller synthesis (ABCS) algorithms for continuous-time control systems by simultaneously maintaining several "layers" of abstract systems with decreasing precision. The resulting abstract multi-layered controller uses the coarsest abstracti...
Article
Full-text available
We present a lazy version of multi-layered abstraction-based controller synthesis (ABCS) for continuous-time nonlinear dynamical systems against safety specifications. State-of-the-art multi-layered ABCS uses pre-computed finite-state abstractions of different coarseness. Our new algorithm improves this technique by computing transitions on-the-fly...
Article
Full-text available
We present lazy abstraction-based controller synthesis (ABCS) for continuous-time nonlinear dynamical systems against reach-avoid specifications. State-of-the-art multi-layered ABCS pre-computes multiple finite-state abstractions of different coarseness and applies reactive synthesis to the coarsest abstraction whenever feasible, but adaptively con...
Article
Full-text available
We present Flipper, a natural language interface for describing high level task specifications for robots that are compiled into robot actions. Flipper starts with a formal core language for task planning that allows expressing rich temporal specifications and uses a semantic parser to provide a natural language interface. Flipper provides immediat...