In this paper we present a proof system that operates on graphs instead of formulas. Starting from the well-known relationship between formulas and cographs, we drop the cograph-conditions and look at arbitrary undirected) graphs. This means that we lose the tree structure of the formulas corresponding to the cographs, and we can no longer use standard proof theoretical methods that depend on that tree structure. In order to overcome this difficulty, we use a modular decomposition of graphs and some techniques from deep inference where inference rules do not rely on the main connective of a formula. For our proof system we show the admissibility of cut and a generalisation of the splitting property. Finally, we show that our system is a conservative extension of multiplicative linear logic with mix, and we argue that our graphs form a notion of generalised connective.
Theorem proving is one of the oldest applications which require heuristics to prune the search space. Invertible proof procedures has been the major tool. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful heuristic called $nongshim$ which can be seen as an underlying principle of invertible proof procedures. Using this heuristic, we derive an invertible sequent calculus\cite{Ketonen,Troe} from sequent calculus for propositional logic.
We define a infinitary labelled sequent calculus for PDL, G3PDL^{\infty}. A finitarily representable cyclic system, G3PDL^ω, is then given. We show that both are sound and complete with respect to standard models of PDL and, further, that G3PDL^{\infty} is cut-free complete. We additionally investigate proof-search strategies in the cyclic system for the fragment of PDL without tests.
Separation logics are a family of extensions of Hoare logic for reasoning about programs that mutate memory. These logics are "abstract" because they are independent of any particular concrete memory model. Their assertion languages, called propositional abstract separation logics, extend the logic of (Boolean) Bunched Implications (BBI) in various ways. We develop a modular proof theory for various propositional abstract separation logics using cut-free labelled sequent calculi. We first extend the cut-fee labelled sequent calculus for BBI of Hou et al to handle Calcagno et al's original logi…
In this paper, we present a formalization of Kozen's propositional modal $μ$-calculus, in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions. We address several problematic issues, such as the use of higher-order abstract syntax in inductive sets in presence of recursive constructors, the encoding of modal (``proof'') rules and of context sensitive grammars. The encoding can be used in the \Coq system, providing an experimental computer-aided proof environment for the interactive development of error-free proofs in the $μ$-calculus. The techniques we adopted can be readily ported to other languages and p…
In this article we show how any formula A with a proof in minimal implicational logic that is super-polynomially sized has a polynomially-sized proof in classical implicational propositional logic . This fact provides an argument in favor that any classical propositional tautology has short proofs, i.e., NP=CoNP.
Resolution and superposition are common techniques which have seen widespread use with propositional and first-order logic in modern theorem provers. In these cases, resolution proof production is a key feature of such tools; however, the proofs that they produce are not necessarily as concise as possible. For propositional resolution proofs, there are a wide variety of proof compression techniques. There are fewer techniques for compressing first-order resolution proofs generated by automated theorem provers. This paper describes an approach to compressing first-order logic proofs based on li…
We give a procedure for counting the number of different proofs of a formula in various sorts of propositional logic. This number is either an integer (that may be 0 if the formula is not provable) or infinite.
It is well known that the resolution method (for propositional logic) is complete. However, completeness proofs found in the literature use an argument by contradiction showing that if a set of clauses is unsatisfiable, then it must have a resolution refutation. As a consequence, none of these proofs actually gives an algorithm for producing a resolution refutation from an unsatisfiable set of clauses. In this note, we give a simple and constructive proof of the completeness of propositional resolution which consists of an algorithm together with a proof of its correctness.
The logic FO(ID) uses ideas from the field of logic programming to extend first order logic with non-monotone inductive definitions. Such logic formally extends logic programming, abductive logic programming and datalog, and thus formalizes the view on these formalisms as logics of (generalized) inductive definitions. The goal of this paper is to study a deductive inference method for PC(ID), which is the propositional fragment of FO(ID). We introduce a formal proof system based on the sequent calculus (Gentzen-style deductive system) for this logic. As PC(ID) is an integration of classical pr…
It is known [DemriSchnoebelen02] that both satisfiability and model-checking problems for propositional Linear-time Temporal Logic, LTL, with only a single propositional variable in the language are PSPACE-complete, which coincides with the complexity of these problems for LTL with an arbitrary number of propositional variables [SislaClarke85]. In the present paper, we show that the same result can be obtained by modifying the original proof of SPACE-hardness for LTL from [SislaClarke85]; i.e., we show how to modify the construction from [SislaClarke85] to model the computations of polynomiall…
In proof theory the notion of canonical proof is rather basic, and it is usually taken for granted that a canonical proof of a sentence must be unique up to certain minor syntactical details (such as, e.g., change of bound variables). When setting up a proof theory for equality one is faced with a rather unexpected situation where there may not be a unique canonical proof of an equality statement. Indeed, in a (1994--5) proposal for the formalisation of proofs of propositional equality in the Curry--Howard style, we have already uncovered such a peculiarity. Totally independently, and in a dif…
Cut-elimination is one of the most famous problems in proof theory, and it was defined and solved for first-order sequent calculus by Gentzen in his celebrated Hauptsatz. Ceres is a different cut-elimination algorithm for first- and higher-order classical logic. Ceres was extended to proof schemata, which are templates for usual first-order proofs, with parameters for natural numbers. However, while Ceres is known to be a complete cut-elimination algorithm for first-order logic, it is not clear whether this holds for first-order schemata too: given in input a proof schema with cuts, does Ceres…
This article answers two questions (posed in the literature), each concerning the guaranteed existence of proofs free of double negation. A proof is free of double negation if none of its deduced steps contains a term of the form n(n(t)) for some term t, where n denotes negation. The first question asks for conditions on the hypotheses that, if satisfied, guarantee the existence of a double-negation-free proof when the conclusion is free of double negation. The second question asks about the existence of an axiom system for classical propositional calculus whose use, for theorems with a conclu…
The inverse method is a saturation based theorem proving technique; it relies on a forward proof-search strategy and can be applied to cut-free calculi enjoying the subformula property. Here we apply this method to derive the unprovability of a goal formula G in Intuitionistic Propositional Logic. To this aim we design a forward calculus FRJ(G) for Intuitionistic unprovability which is prone to constructively ascertain the unprovability of a formula G by providing a concise countermodel for it; in particular we prove that the generated countermodels have minimal height. Moreover, we clarify th…
This paper concerns a goal directed proof procedure for the propositional fragment of the adaptive logic ACLuN1. At the propositional level, it forms an algorithm for final derivability. If extended to the predicative level, it provides a criterion for final derivability. This is essential in view of the absence of a positive test. The procedure may be generalized to all flat adaptive logics.
In this paper we consider propositional calculi, which are finitely axiomatizable extensions of intuitionistic implicational propositional calculus together with the rules of modus ponens and substitution. We give a proof of undecidability of the following problem for these calculi: whether a given finite set of propositional formulas constitutes an adequate axiom system for a fixed propositional calculus. Moreover, we prove the same for the following restriction of this problem: whether a given finite set of theorems of a fixed propositional calculus derives all theorems of this calculus. The…
In a modular approach, we lift Hilbert-style proof systems for propositional, modal and first-order logic to generalized systems for their respective team-based extensions. We obtain sound and complete axiomatizations for the dependence-free fragment FO(~) of Väänänen's first-order team logic TL, for propositional team logic PTL, quantified propositional team logic QPTL, modal team logic MTL, and for the corresponding logics of dependence, independence, inclusion and exclusion. As a crucial step in the completeness proof, we show that the above logics admit, in a particular sense, a semantics-…
We study -- within the framework of propositional proof complexity -- the problem of certifying unsatisfiability of CNF formulas under the promise that any satisfiable formula has many satisfying assignments, where ``many'' stands for an explicitly specified function $\Lam$ in the number of variables $n$. To this end, we develop propositional proof systems under different measures of promises (that is, different $\Lam$) as extensions of resolution. This is done by augmenting resolution with axioms that, roughly, can eliminate sets of truth assignments defined by Boolean circuits. We then inves…
IBM Research -- Tokyo（IBM研究院（东京））；Kyoto University（京都大学）
Inspired by the recent evolution of deep neural networks (DNNs) in machine learning, we explore their application to PL-related topics. This paper is the first step towards this goal; we propose a proof-synthesis method for the negation-free propositional logic in which we use a DNN to obtain a guide of proof search. The idea is to view the proof-synthesis problem as a translation from a proposition to its proof. We train seq2seq, which is a popular network in neural machine translation, so that it generates a proof encoded as a $λ$-term of a given proposition. We implement the whole framework…
In 1979 Richard Statman proved, using proof-theory, that the purely implicational fragment of Intuitionistic Logic (M-imply) is PSPACE-complete. He showed a polynomially bounded translation from full Intuitionistic Propositional Logic into its implicational fragment. By the PSPACE-completeness of S4, proved by Ladner, and the Goedel translation from S4 into Intuitionistic Logic, the PSPACE- completeness of M-imply is drawn. The sub-formula principle for a deductive system for a logic L states that whenever F1,...,Fk proves A, there is a proof in which each formula occurrence is either a sub-fo…
We present a novel propositional proof tracing format that eliminates complex processing, thus enabling efficient (formal) proof checking. The benefits of this format are demonstrated by implementing a proof checker in C, which outperforms a state-of-the-art checker by two orders of magnitude. We then formalize the theory underlying propositional proof checking in Coq, and extract a correct-by-construction proof checker for our format from the formalization. An empirical evaluation using 280 unsatisfiable instances from the 2015 and 2016 SAT competitions shows that this certified checker usual…
In this paper, we develop a quantified propositional proof systems that corresponds to logarithmic-space reasoning. We begin by defining a class SigmaCNF(2) of quantified formulas that can be evaluated in log space. Then our new proof system GL^* is defined as G_1^* with cuts restricted to SigmaCNF(2) formulas and no cut formula that is not quantifier free contains a free variable that does not appear in the final formula. To show that GL^* is strong enough to capture log space reasoning, we translate theorems of VL into a family of tautologies that have polynomial-size GL^* proofs. VL is a th…
The robustness and correctness of SAT solvers are receiving more and more attention. In recent SAT competitions, a proof of unsatisfiability emitted by SAT solvers must be checked. So far, no proof checker has been efficient for every case. In the SAT competition 2016, some proofs were not verified within 20000 seconds. For this reason, we decided to develop a more efficient proof checker called TreeRat. This new checker uses a window shifting technique to improve the level of efficiency at which it verifies proofs of unsatisfiability. At the same time, we suggest that tree-search-based SAT so…
National Institute of Informatics（国立情报学研究所）；Kyoto University（京都大学）
This work explores the application of deep learning, a machine learning technique that uses deep neural networks (DNN) in its core, to an automated theorem proving (ATP) problem. To this end, we construct a statistical model which quantifies the likelihood that a proof is indeed a correct one of a given proposition. Based on this model, we give a proof-synthesis procedure that searches for a proof in the order of the likelihood. This procedure uses an estimator of the likelihood of an inference rule being applied at each step of a proof. As an implementation of the estimator, we propose a prop…
In this article we present a class of formulas Fn, n in Nat, that need at least 2^n assumptions to be proved in a normal proof in Natural Deduction for purely implicational minimal propositional logic. In purely implicational classical propositional logic, with Peirce's rule, each Fn is proved with only one assumption in Natural Deduction in a normal proof. Hence, the formulas Fn have exponentially sized proofs in cut-free Sequent Calculus and Tableaux. In fact 2^n is the lower-bound for normal proofs in ND, cut-free Sequent proofs and Tableaux. We discuss the consequences of the existence of …
Gordeev and Haeusler [GH19] claim that each tautology $ρ$ of minimal propositional logic can be proved with a natural deduction of size polynomial in $|ρ|$. This builds on work from Hudelmaier [Hud93] that found a similar result for intuitionistic propositional logic, but for which only the height of the proof was polynomially bounded, not the overall size. They arrive at this result by transforming a proof in Hudelmaier's sequent calculus into an equivalent tree-like proof in Prawitz's system of natural deduction, and then compressing the tree-like proof into an equivalent DAG-like proof in s…
It is well-known that the size of propositional classical proofs can be huge. Proof theoretical studies discovered exponential gaps between normal or cut free proofs and their respective non-normal proofs. The aim of this work is to study how to reduce the weight of propositional deductions. We present the formalism of proof-graphs for purely implicational logic, which are graphs of a specific shape that are intended to capture the logical structure of a deduction. The advantage of this formalism is that formulas can be shared in the reduced proof. In the present paper we give a precise defini…
Proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) is the paradigm of semantics in which meaning in logic is based on proof (as opposed to truth). A particular instance of P-tS for intuitionistic propositional logic (IPL) is its base-extension semantics (B-eS). This semantics is given by a relation called support, explaining the meaning of the logical constants, which is parameterized by systems of rules called bases that provide the semantics of atomic propositions. In this paper, we interpret bases as collections of definite formulae and use the operational view of the latter as provided by uniform proof-sear…
We prove that the propositional translations of the Kneser-Lovász theorem have polynomial size extended Frege proofs and quasi-polynomial size Frege proofs. We present a new counting-based combinatorial proof of the Kneser-Lovász theorem that avoids the topological arguments of prior proofs for all but finitely many cases for each k. We introduce a miniaturization of the octahedral Tucker lemma, called the truncated Tucker lemma: it is open whether its propositional translations have (quasi-)polynomial size Frege or extended Frege proofs.
We consider the proof complexity of the minimal complete fragment, KS, of standard deep inference systems for propositional logic. To examine the size of proofs we employ atomic flows, diagrams that trace structural changes through a proof but ignore logical information. As results we obtain a polynomial simulation of versions of Resolution, along with some extensions. We also show that these systems, as well as bounded-depth Frege systems, cannot polynomially simulate KS, by giving polynomial-size proofs of certain variants of the propositional pigeonhole principle in KS.
This paper studies propositional proof systems in which lines are sequents of decision trees or branching programs - deterministic and nondeterministic. The systems LDT and LNDT are propositional proof systems in which lines represent deterministic or non-deterministic decision trees. Branching programs are modeled as decision dags. Adding extension to LDT and LNDT gives systems eLDT and eLNDT in which lines represent deterministic and non-deterministic branching programs, respectively. Deterministic and non-deterministic branching programs correspond to log-space (L) and nondeterministic log-…
In this document, we study a 3-polygraphic translation for the proofs of SKS, a formal system for classical propositional logic. We prove that the free 3-category generated by this 3-polygraph describes the proofs of classical propositional logic modulo structural bureaucracy. We give a 3-dimensional generalization of Penrose diagrams and use it to provide several pictures of a proof. We sketch how local transformations of proofs yield a non contrived example of 4-dimensional rewriting.
Game semantics aim at describing the interactive behaviour of proofs by interpreting formulas as games on which proofs induce strategies. In this article, we introduce a game semantics for a fragment of first order propositional logic. One of the main difficulties that has to be faced when constructing such semantics is to make them precise by characterizing definable strategies - that is strategies which actually behave like a proof. This characterization is usually done by restricting to the model to strategies satisfying subtle combinatory conditions such as innocence, whose preservation un…
We define a fragment of propositional logic where isomorphic propositions, such as $A\land B$ and $B\land A$, or $A\Rightarrow (B\land C)$ and $(A\Rightarrow B)\land(A\Rightarrow C)$ are identified. We define System I, a proof language for this logic, and prove its normalisation and consistency.
We connect learning algorithms and algorithms automating proof search in propositional proof systems: for every sufficiently strong, well-behaved propositional proof system $P$, we prove that the following statements are equivalent, 1. Provable learning: $P$ proves efficiently that p-size circuits are learnable by subexponential-size circuits over the uniform distribution with membership queries. 2. Provable automatability: $P$ proves efficiently that $P$ is automatable by non-uniform circuits on propositional formulas expressing p-size circuit lower bounds. Here, $P$ is sufficiently strong an…
The existence of a (p-)optimal propositional proof system is a major open question in (proof) complexity; many people conjecture that such systems do not exist. Krajicek and Pudlak (1989) show that this question is equivalent to the existence of an algorithm that is optimal on all propositional tautologies. Monroe (2009) recently gave a conjecture implying that such algorithm does not exist. We show that in the presence of errors such optimal algorithms do exist. The concept is motivated by the notion of heuristic algorithms. Namely, we allow the algorithm to claim a small number of false "the…
