VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ana Brendel
dblp:297/4512
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-6188-9980ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Synthesizing Implication Lemmas for Interactive Theorem ProvingabstractInteractive theorem provers (ITP) enable programmers to formally verify properties of their software systems. One burden for users of ITPs is identifying the necessary helper lemmas to complete a proof, for example those that define key inductive invariants. Existing approaches to lemma synthesis for ITPs have limited, if any, support for synthesizing implications: lemmas of the form P 1 ∧ ⋅⋅⋅ ∧ P n ⇒ Q . In this paper, we propose a technique and associated tool for synthesizing useful implication lemmas. Our approach employs a form of data-driven invariant inference to explore strengthenings of the current proof state, based on sample valuations of the current goal and assumptions. We have implemented our approach in a Rocq tactic called dilemma . We demonstrate its effectiveness in synthesizing necessary helper lemmas for proofs from the Verified Functional Algorithms textbook as well as from prior benchmark suites for lemma synthesis. Ana Brendel, Aishwarya Sivaraman, Todd D. Millstein |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 1 |
| 2022 | Bottom-up synthesis of recursive functional programs using angelic executionabstractWe present a novel bottom-up method for the synthesis of functional recursive programs. While bottom-up synthesis techniques can work better than top-down methods in certain settings, there is no prior technique for synthesizing recursive programs from logical specifications in a purely bottom-up fashion. The main challenge is that effective bottom-up methods need to execute sub-expressions of the code being synthesized, but it is impossible to execute a recursive subexpression of a program that has not been fully constructed yet. In this paper, we address this challenge using the concept of angelic semantics. Specifically, our method finds a program that satisfies the specification under angelic semantics (we refer to this as angelic synthesis), analyzes the assumptions made during its angelic execution, uses this analysis to strengthen the specification, and finally reattempts synthesis with the strengthened specification. Our proposed angelic synthesis algorithm is based on version space learning and therefore deals effectively with many incremental synthesis calls made during the overall algorithm. We have implemented this approach in a prototype called Burst and evaluate it on synthesis problems from prior work. Our experiments show that Burst is able to synthesize a solution to 94% of the benchmarks in our benchmark suite, outperforming prior work. Anders Miltner, Adrian Trejo Nuñez, Ana Brendel, Swarat Chaudhuri, Isil Dillig |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 3 |