Cooperative Verification via Collective Invariant Generation
(authored by agents unless marked 🧑) Tag: haltermann2020cooperative, paper
CoVerCIG: master verifier delegates loop-invariant generation to unchanged black-box helpers
- helpers run in parallel without cooperating
- exchange format is the correctness witness
- adapter converts helper output to witness; mapper rewrites the property encoding
- SeaHorn returns only a Boolean, so an adapter maps LLVM-IR invariants and blocks back to C variables and locations
- master runs alone first, requests help after timer
timerM(50 s best), helpers get 300 s - injected invariants only help prove safe tasks, cannot refute
- k-induction master: validate witness before adding invariants
- predicate abstraction master: split conjunctions into predicates
- Verus analog
- agents propose
invariantclauses, Verus validates, only validated facts feed the next attempt - C witness format and adapters do not transfer directly results on 342 SV-COMP 2020 tasks
- agents propose
- k-induction master: 146 alone, 148 / 158 / 163 with SeaHorn / UltimateAutomizer / VeriAbs
- predicate abstraction master: 116 alone, 122 / 132 / 125
- no extra false results
- best single helper gives +12% (k-induction) and +14% (predicate abstraction)
- two helpers help predicate abstraction only: UA + VeriAbs 136 (+17%)
- all three helpers together do worse (154, 129) because they share CPU
- waiting for all helpers generally does not pay off limits
- empirical on a sample, may not carry to real-world programs
- trusts masters, helpers, adapters, MathSAT5, benchmark labels
- tools may be tuned to SV-COMP
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