VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Sergei Stepanenko
dblp:354/1470
· DBLP profile ↗
4ranked-venue papers
2as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-7322-5644ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 3 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Theory of computation · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Context-Dependent Effects in Guarded Interaction TreesabstractAbstract Guarded Interaction Trees are a structure and a fully formalized framework for representing higher-order computations with higher-order effects in Coq. We present an extension of Guarded Interaction Trees to support formal reasoning about context-dependent effects. That is, effects whose behaviors depend on the evaluation context, e.g., , and . Using and reasoning about such effects is challenging since certain compositionality principles no longer hold in the presence of such effects. For example, the so-called “bind rule” in modern program logics (which allows one to reason modularly about a term inside a context) is no longer valid. The goal of our extension is to support representation and reasoning about context-dependent effects in the most painless way possible. To that end, our extension is conservative: the reasoning principles (and the Coq implementation) for context-independent effects remain the same. We show that our implementation of context-dependent effects is viable and powerful. We use it to give direct-style denotational semantics for higher-order programming languages with and with delimited continuations. We extend the program logic for Guarded Interaction Trees to account for context-dependent effects, and we use the program logic to prove that the denotational semantics is adequate with respect to the operational semantics. This is achieved by constructing logical relations between syntax and semantics inside the program logic. Additionally, we retain the ability to combine multiple effects in a modular way, which we demonstrate by showing type soundness for safe interoperability of a programming language with delimited continuations and a programming language with higher-order store. Sergei Stepanenko, Emma Nardino, Daniil Frumin, Amin Timany, Lars Birkedal |
ESOP (2) | 1 |
| 2025 | Solving Guarded Domain Equations in Presheaves over Ordinals and Mechanizing It
Sergei Stepanenko, Amin Timany |
FSCD | 1 |
| 2024 | The Essence of Generalized Algebraic Data TypesabstractThis paper considers direct encodings of generalized algebraic data types (GADTs) in a minimal suitable lambda-calculus. To this end, we develop an extension of System F ω with recursive types and internalized type equalities with injective constant type constructors. We show how GADTs and associated pattern-matching constructs can be directly expressed in the calculus, thus showing that it may be treated as a highly idealized modern functional programming language. We prove that the internalized type equalities in conjunction with injectivity rules increase the expressive power of the calculus by establishing a non-macro-expressibility result in F ω , and prove the system type-sound via a syntactic argument. Finally, we build two relational models of our calculus: a simple, unary model that illustrates a novel, two-stage interpretation technique, necessary to account for the equational constraints; and a more sophisticated, binary model that relaxes the construction to allow, for the first time, formal reasoning about data-abstraction in a calculus equipped with GADTs. Filip Sieczkowski, Sergei Stepanenko, Jonathan Sterling, Lars Birkedal |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 2 |
| 2023 | VMSL: A Separation Logic for Mechanised Robust Safety of Virtual Machines Communicating above FF-AabstractThin hypervisors make it possible to isolate key security components like keychains, fingerprint readers, and digital wallets from the easily-compromised operating system. To work together, virtual machines running on top of the hypervisor can make hypercalls to the hypervisor to share pages between each other in a controlled way. However, the design of such hypercall ABIs remains a delicate balancing task between conflicting needs for expressivity, performance, and security. In particular, it raises the question of what makes the specification of a hypervisor, and of its hypercall ABIs, good enough for the virtual machines. In this paper, we validate the expressivity and security of the design of the hypercall ABIs of Arm's FF-A. We formalise a substantial fragment of FF-A as a machine with a simplified ISA in which hypercalls are steps of the machine. We then develop VMSL, a novel separation logic, which we prove sound with respect to the machine execution model, and use it to reason modularly about virtual machines which communicate through the hypercall ABIs, demonstrating the hypercall ABIs' expressivity. Moreover, we use the logic to prove robust safety of communicating virtual machines, that is, the guarantee that even if some of the virtual machines are compromised and execute unknown code, they cannot break the safety properties of other virtual machines running known code. This demonstrates the intended security guarantees of the hypercall ABIs. All the results in the paper have been formalised in Coq using the Iris framework. Zongyuan Liu 0001, Sergei Stepanenko, Jean Pichon-Pharabod, Amin Timany, Aslan Askarov, Lars Birkedal |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 2 |