Person. Zhengyao Lin

Papers

Cazamariposas: Automated Instability Debugging in SMT-Based Program Verification zhou-2025-cazamariposas

Program verification languages such as Dafny and F⋆ often rely heavily on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers for proof automation. However, SMT-based verification suffers from instability, where semantically irrelevant changes in the source program can cause spurious proof failures. While existing mitigation techniques emphasize preemptive measures, we propose a complementary approach that focuses on diagnosing and repairing specific instances of instability-induced failures. Our key technique is a novel differential analysis to pinpoint problematic quantified formulas in an unstable query. We implement this technique in Cazamariposas, a tool that automatically identifies such quantified formulas and suggests fixes. We evaluate Cazamariposas on multiple large-scale systems verification projects written in three different program verification languages. Our results demonstrate Cazamariposas’ effectiveness as an instability debugger. In the majority of cases, Cazamariposas successfully isolates the issue to a single problematic quantifier, while providing a stabilizing fix.
DOI

FlowCert: Translation Validation for Asynchronous Dataflow via Dynamic Fractional Permissions lin-2024-flowcert

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) have gained attention in recent years due to their promising power efficiency compared to traditional von Neumann architectures. To program these architectures using ordinary languages such as C, a dataflow compiler must transform the original sequential, imperative program into an equivalent dataflow graph, composed of dataflow operators running in parallel. This transformation is challenging since the asynchronous nature of dataflow graphs allows out-of-order execution of operators, leading to behaviors not present in the original imperative programs. Weaddress this challenge by developing a translation validation technique for dataflow compilers to ensure that the dataflow program has the same behavior as the original imperative program on all possible inputs and schedules of execution. We apply this method to a state-of-the-art dataflow compiler targeting the RipTide CGRAarchitecture. Our tool uncovers 8 compiler bugs where the compiler outputs incorrect dataflow graphs, including a data race that is otherwise hard to discover via testing. After repairing these bugs, our tool verifies the correct compilation of all programs in the RipTide benchmark suite.
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