Robert Dickerson

dblp:258/0543 · DBLP profile ↗
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3ranked-venue papers
2as first author
3since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-2697-2145ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 3 · 2 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 KestRel: Relational Verification using E-Graphs for Program Alignment
abstract
Many interesting program properties involve the execution of multiple programs, including observational equivalence, noninterference, co-termination, monotonicity, and idempotency. One strategy for verifying such relational properties is to construct and reason about an intermediate program whose correctness implies that the individual programs exhibit those properties. A key challenge in building an intermediate program is finding a good alignment of the original programs. An alignment puts subparts of the original programs into correspondence so that their similarities can be exploited in order to simplify verification. We propose an approach to intermediate program construction that uses e-graphs, equality saturation, and algebraic realignment rules to efficiently represent and build programs amenable to automated verification. A key ingredient of our solution is a novel data-driven extraction technique that uses execution traces of candidate intermediate programs to identify solutions that are semantically well-aligned. We have implemented a relational verification engine based on our proposed approach, called KestRel , and use it to evaluate our approach over a suite of benchmarks taken from the relational verification literature.
Robert Dickerson, Prasita Mukherjee, Benjamin Delaware
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.1
2022 RHLE: Modular Deductive Verification of Relational ∀ ∃ Properties
Robert Dickerson, Qianchuan Ye, Michael K. Zhang, Benjamin Delaware
APLAS1
2021 Data-driven abductive inference of library specifications
abstract
Programmers often leverage data structure libraries that provide useful and reusable abstractions. Modular verification of programs that make use of these libraries naturally rely on specifications that capture important properties about how the library expects these data structures to be accessed and manipulated. However, these specifications are often missing or incomplete, making it hard for clients to be confident they are using the library safely. When library source code is also unavailable, as is often the case, the challenge to infer meaningful specifications is further exacerbated. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven abductive inference mechanism that infers specifications for library methods sufficient to enable verification of the library's clients. Our technique combines a data-driven learning-based framework to postulate candidate specifications, along with SMT-provided counterexamples to refine these candidates, taking special care to prevent generating specifications that overfit to sampled tests. The resulting specifications form a minimal set of requirements on the behavior of library implementations that ensures safety of a particular client program. Our solution thus provides a new multi-abduction procedure for precise specification inference of data structure libraries guided by client-side verification tasks. Experimental results on a wide range of realistic OCaml data structure programs demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Robert Dickerson, Benjamin Delaware, Suresh Jagannathan
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.2