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Decoupling the Ascending and Descending Phases in Abstract Interpretation

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2022)

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Abstract

Abstract Interpretation approximates the semantics of a program by mimicking its concrete fixpoint computation on an abstract domain \(\mathbb {A}\). The abstract (post-) fixpoint computation is classically divided into two phases: the ascending phase, using widenings as extrapolation operators to enforce termination, is followed by a descending phase, using narrowings as interpolation operators, so as to mitigate the effect of the precision losses introduced by widenings. In this paper we propose a simple variation of this classical approach where, to more effectively recover precision, we decouple the two phases: in particular, before starting the descending phase, we replace the domain \(\mathbb {A}\) with a more precise abstract domain \(\mathbb {D}\). The correctness of the approach is justified by casting it as an instance of the A\(^2\)I framework. After demonstrating the new technique on a simple example, we summarize the results of a preliminary experimental evaluation, showing that it is able to obtain significant precision improvements for several choices of the domains \(\mathbb {A}\) and \(\mathbb {D}\).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In general, the least fixpoint on the concrete domain C is not finitely computable. Hence, the idea is to compute an abstract fixpoint, over an abstract domain A, that correctly approximates the concrete one.

  2. 2.

    By design, PAGAI does not use proper narrowing operators to enforce the termination of the decreasing sequence; rather, it stops when the iteration count reaches the threshold value (or earlier, if a fixpoint is detected).

  3. 3.

    The total number of widening points is 281.

  4. 4.

    Probably, this is due to the fact that the abstract domain glb operator implements a correct narrowing as soon as we can enforce a finite number of applications.

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  1. University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Vincenzo Arceri & Enea Zaffanella

  2. University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Isabella Mastroeni

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  1. Vincenzo Arceri
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    Ilya Sergey

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Arceri, V., Mastroeni, I., Zaffanella, E. (2022). Decoupling the Ascending and Descending Phases in Abstract Interpretation. In: Sergey, I. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21037-2_2

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