Contextual Refinement of Higher-Order Concurrent Probabilistic Programs

We present Foxtrot, the first higher-order separation logic for proving contextual refinement of higher-order concurrent probabilistic programs with higher-order local state. From a high level, Foxtrot inherits various concurrency reasoning principles from standard concurrent separation logic, e.g. invariants and ghost resources, and supports advanced probabilistic reasoning principles for reasoning about complex probability distributions induced by concurrent threads, e.g. tape presampling and induction by error amplification. The integration of these strong reasoning principles is highly non-trivial due to the combination of probability and concurrency in the language and the complexity of the Foxtrot model; the soundness of the logic relies on a version of the axiom of choice within the Iris logic, which is not used in earlier work on Iris-based logics. We demonstrate the expressiveness of Foxtrot on a wide range of examples, including the adversarial von Neumann coin and the randombytes _ uniform function of the Sodium cryptography software library. All results have been mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant and the Iris separation logic framework.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Published
2026-06-08
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3808265
Primary Topic
Formal Methods in Verification
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Contextual Refinement of Higher-Order Concurrent Probabilistic Programs

Lars Birkedal, Kwing Hei Li, Joseph Tassarotti, Alejandro Aguirre
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Formal Methods in Verification
article

Contextual Refinement of Higher-Order Concurrent Probabilistic Programs

Lars Birkedal, Kwing Hei Li, Joseph Tassarotti, Alejandro Aguirre
article en

Abstract

We present Foxtrot, the first higher-order separation logic for proving contextual refinement of higher-order concurrent probabilistic programs with higher-order local state. From a high level, Foxtrot inherits various concurrency reasoning principles from standard concurrent separation logic, e.g. invariants and ghost resources, and supports advanced probabilistic reasoning principles for reasoning about complex probability distributions induced by concurrent threads, e.g. tape presampling and induction by error amplification. The integration of these strong reasoning principles is highly non-trivial due to the combination of probability and concurrency in the language and the complexity of the Foxtrot model; the soundness of the logic relies on a version of the axiom of choice within the Iris logic, which is not used in earlier work on Iris-based logics. We demonstrate the expressiveness of Foxtrot on a wide range of examples, including the adversarial von Neumann coin and the randombytes _ uniform function of the Sodium cryptography software library. All results have been mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant and the Iris separation logic framework.

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesVol. 10(PLDI)
Aarhus University (DK), New York University (US)
National Science Foundation, Villum Fonden, European Research Council
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Formal Methods in Verification
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