VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Holger Thies
dblp:221/7889
· DBLP profile ↗
14ranked-venue papers
2as first author
8since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-3959-0741ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Theory of computation · 14 · 2 first-author · 8 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Computing Solutions for Systems of Multivariate Ordinary Differential Equations in RocqabstractWe formalize a solver for initial value problems for systems of multivariate analytic ordinary differential equations in the sense of constructive/computable analysis, using the Rocq proof assistant. The construction follows the classical proof of the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, computing the Taylor series expansion of the solution by iteratively deriving its coefficients. We prove that the computed Taylor series converges and provide explicit bounds on the truncation error, ensuring the error can be made arbitrarily small. Instead of relying on a concrete implementation of constructive reals, we develop an abstract framework using type classes and setoids, allowing the formalization to remain flexible and compatible with different implementations. Additionally, we extend the formalization to a more efficient variant based on interval arithmetic and illustrate its practical use with several examples. Holger Thies |
CPP | 1 |
| 2025 | Computable Analysis for Extraction of Certified Programs and Its Applications
Holger Thies |
CiE | 1 |
| 2025 | Extracting efficient exact real number computation from proofs in constructive type theoryabstractAbstract Exact real computation is an alternative to floating-point arithmetic where operations on real numbers are performed exactly, without the introduction of rounding errors. When proving the correctness of an implementation, one can focus solely on the mathematical properties of the problem without thinking about the subtleties of representing real numbers. We propose a new axiomatization of the real numbers in a dependent type theory with the goal of extracting certified exact real computation programs from constructive proofs. Our formalization differs from similar approaches, in that we formalize the reals in a conceptually similar way as some mature implementations of exact real computation. Primitive operations on reals can be extracted directly to the corresponding operations in such an implementation, producing more efficient programs. We particularly focus on the formalization of partial and nondeterministic computation, which is essential in exact real computation. We prove the soundness of our formalization with regards to the standard realizability interpretation from computable analysis and show how to relate our theory to a classical formalization of the reals. We demonstrate the feasibility of our theory by implementing it in the Coq proof assistant and present several natural examples. From the examples we have automatically extracted Haskell programs that use the exact real computation framework AERN for efficiently performing exact operations on real numbers. In experiments, the extracted programs behave similarly to native implementations in AERN in terms of running time and memory usage. Michal Konecný, Sewon Park 0001, Holger Thies |
J. Log. Comput. | 3 |
| 2024 | A Coq Formalization of Taylor Models and Power Series for Solving Ordinary Differential EquationsabstractIn exact real computation real numbers are manipulated exactly without round-off errors, making it well-suited for high precision verified computation. In recent work we propose an axiomatic formalization of exact real computation in the Coq theorem prover. The formalization admits an extended extraction mechanism that lets us extract computational content from constructive parts of proofs to efficient programs built on top of AERN, a Haskell library for exact real computation. Many processes in science and engineering are modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and often safety-critical applications depend on computing their solutions correctly. The primary goal of the current work is to extend our framework to spaces of functions and to support computation of solutions to ODEs and other essential operators. In numerical mathematics, the most common way to represent continuous functions is to use polynomial approximations. This can be modeled by so-called Taylor models, that encode a function as a polynomial and a rigorous error-bound over some domain. We define types of classical functions that do not hold any computational content and formalize Taylor models to computationally approximate those classical functions. Classical functions are defined in a way to admit classical principles in their constructions and verification. We define various basic operations on Taylor models and verify their correctness based on the classical functions that they approximate. We then shift our interest to analytic functions as a generalization of Taylor models where polynomials are replaced by infinite power series. We use the formalization to develop a theory of non-linear polynomial ODEs. From the proofs we can extract certified exact real computation programs that compute solutions of ODEs on some time interval up to any precision. Sewon Park 0001, Holger Thies |
ITP | 2 |
| 2023 | Formalizing Hyperspaces for Extracting Efficient Exact Real ComputationabstractExact real computation is an alternative to floating-point arithmetic where operations on real numbers are performed exactly, without the introduction of rounding errors. When proving the correctness of an implementation, one can focus solely on the mathematical properties of the problem without thinking about the subtleties of representing real numbers. We propose a new axiomatization of the real numbers in a dependent type theory with the goal of extracting certified exact real computation programs from constructive proofs. Our formalization differs from similar approaches, in that we formalize the reals in a conceptually similar way as some mature implementations of exact real computation. Primitive operations on reals can be extracted directly to the corresponding operations in such an implementation, producing more efficient programs. We particularly focus on the formalization of partial and nondeterministic computation, which is essential in exact real computation. We prove the soundness of our formalization with regards of the standard realizability interpretation from computable analysis and show how to relate our theory to a classical formalization of the reals. We demonstrate the feasibility of our theory by implementing it in the Coq proof assistant and present several natural examples. From the examples we have automatically extracted Haskell programs that use the exact real computation framework AERN for efficiently performing exact operations on real numbers. In experiments, the extracted programs behave similarly to native implementations in AERN in terms of running time and memory usage. Michal Konecný, Sewon Park 0001, Holger Thies |
MFCS | 3 |
| 2021 | Exact Real Computation of Solution Operators for Linear Analytic Systems of Partial Differential Equations
Svetlana Selivanova, Florian Steinberg 0001, Holger Thies, Martin Ziegler 0001 |
CASC | 3 |
| 2021 | Axiomatic Reals and Certified Efficient Exact Real Computation
Michal Konecný, Sewon Park 0001, Holger Thies |
WoLLIC | 3 |
| 2021 | Computable analysis and notions of continuity in Coq
Florian Steinberg 0001, Laurent Théry, Holger Thies |
Log. Methods Comput. Sci. | 3 |
| 2020 | Computable Analysis for Verified Exact Real ComputationabstractWe use ideas from computable analysis to formalize exact real number computation in the Coq proof assistant. Our formalization is built on top of the Incone library, a Coq library for computable analysis. We use the theoretical framework that computable analysis provides to systematically generate target specifications for real number algorithms. First we give very simple algorithms that fulfill these specifications based on rational approximations. To provide more efficient algorithms, we develop alternate representations that utilize an existing formalization of floating-point algorithms and interval arithmetic in combination with methods used by software packages for exact real arithmetic that focus on execution speed. We also define a general framework to define real number algorithms independently of their concrete encoding and to prove them correct. Algorithms verified in our framework can be extracted to Haskell programs for efficient computation. The performance of the extracted code is comparable to programs produced using non-verified software packages. This is without the need to optimize the extracted code by hand. As an example, we formalize an algorithm for the square root function based on the Heron method. The algorithm is parametric in the implementation of the real number datatype, not referring to any details of its implementation. Thus the same verified algorithm can be used with different real number representations. Since Boolean valued comparisons of real numbers are not decidable, our algorithms use basic operations that take values in the Kleeneans and Sierpinski space. We develop some of the theory of these spaces. To capture the semantics of non-sequential operations, such as the "parallel or", we use multivalued functions. Michal Konecný, Florian Steinberg 0001, Holger Thies |
FSTTCS | 3 |
| 2020 | Continuous and Monotone MachinesabstractWe investigate a variant of the fuel-based approach to modeling diverging computation in type theories and use it to abstractly capture the essence of oracle Turing machines. The resulting objects we call continuous machines. We prove that it is possible to translate back and forth between such machines and names in the standard function encoding used in computable analysis. Put differently, among the operators on Baire space, exactly the partial continuous ones are implementable by continuous machines and the data that such a machine provides is a description of the operator as a sequentially realizable functional. Continuous machines are naturally formulated in type theories and we have formalized our findings in Coq as part of Incone, a Coq library for computable analysis. The correctness proofs use a classical meta-theory with countable choice. Along the way we formally prove some known results such as the existence of a self-modulating modulus of continuity for partial continuous operators on Baire space. To illustrate their versatility we use continuous machines to specify some algorithms that operate on objects that cannot be fully described by finite means, such as real numbers and functions. We present particularly simple algorithms for finding the multiplicative inverse of a real number and for composition of partial continuous operators on Baire space. Some of the simplicity is achieved by utilizing the fact that continuous machines are compatible with multivalued semantics. Michal Konecný, Florian Steinberg 0001, Holger Thies |
MFCS | 3 |
| 2019 | Quantitative Continuity and Computable Analysis in CoqabstractWe give a number of formal proofs of theorems from the field of computable analysis. Many of our results specify executable algorithms that work on infinite inputs by means of operating on finite approximations and are proven correct in the sense of computable analysis. The development is done in the proof assistant Coq and heavily relies on the Incone library for information theoretic continuity. This library is developed by one of the authors and the results of this paper extend the library. While full executability in a formal development of mathematical statements about real numbers and the like is not a feature that is unique to the Incone library, its original contribution is to adhere to the conventions of computable analysis to provide a general purpose interface for algorithmic reasoning on continuous structures. The paper includes a brief description of the most important concepts of Incone and its sub libraries mf and Metric. The results that provide complete computational content include that the algebraic operations and the efficient limit operator on the reals are computable, that the countably infinite product of a space with itself is isomorphic to a space of functions, compatibility of the enumeration representation of subsets of natural numbers with the abstract definition of the space of open subsets of the natural numbers, and that continuous realizability implies sequential continuity. We also describe many non-computational results that support the correctness of definitions from the library. These include that the information theoretic notion of continuity used in the library is equivalent to the metric notion of continuity on Baire space, a complete comparison of the different concepts of continuity that arise from metric and represented space structures and the discontinuity of the unrestricted limit operator on the real numbers and the task of selecting an element of a closed subset of the natural numbers. Florian Steinberg 0001, Laurent Théry, Holger Thies |
ITP | 3 |
| 2019 | Second-Order Linear-Time Computability with Applications to Computable Analysis
Akitoshi Kawamura, Florian Steinberg 0001, Holger Thies |
TAMC | 3 |
| 2018 | Average-Case Polynomial-Time Computability of Hamiltonian DynamicsabstractWe apply average-case complexity theory to physical problems modeled by continuous-time dynamical systems. The computational complexity when simulating such systems for a bounded time-frame mainly stems from trajectories coming close to complex singularities of the system. We show that if for most initial values the trajectories do not come close to singularities the simulation can be done in polynomial time on average. For Hamiltonian systems we relate this to the volume of "almost singularities" in phase space and give some general criteria to show that a Hamiltonian system can be simulated efficiently on average. As an application we show that the planar circular-restricted three-body problem is average-case polynomial-time computable. Akitoshi Kawamura, Holger Thies, Martin Ziegler 0001 |
MFCS | 2 |
| 2018 | Parameterized Complexity for Uniform Operators on Multidimensional Analytic Functions and ODE Solving
Akitoshi Kawamura, Florian Steinberg 0001, Holger Thies |
WoLLIC | 3 |