PaMpeR: Proof Method Recommendation System for Isabelle/HOL
Paper · 2018 · Yutaka Nagashima and Yilun He
Summary
Isabelle/HOL offers a large toolbox of proof methods, with 159 in its standard library alone. Picking the right one for a given proof state takes experience that newcomers usually lack. PaMpeR tackles this by mining proofs that experts have already written. In a preparation phase, a feature extractor works through proof states taken from big proof collections, the Archive of Formal Proofs (AFP) being a prime example. It encodes each state as a boolean vector produced by 108 hand-written assertions in Standard ML. These assertions examine the goal, the chained facts and the background context, for example inferring how a constant was defined from automatically derived lemma names. The system then trains one regression tree per proof method, estimating how likely that method is to be applied to states with particular features. At proof time, users can request recommendations, explanations and rankings directly in Isabelle/jEdit. The evaluation shows that PaMpeR reproduces expert choices well, especially for special-purpose methods. This makes it a practical way to transfer expert know-how to new users.
Key points
- Each proof state is abstracted into an array of booleans by 108 manually designed assertions. The mapping is many-to-one, so each vector stands for a group of similar proof states.
- The training data comes from existing proof corpora, mainly the AFP. The data is split into one database per proof method, and a multi-output regression algorithm builds a separate regression tree for each method.
- Assertions avoid depending on user-defined constants. Instead they rely on meta-information, such as whether a lemma like
sep.elimsexists, which signals a definition made withfunorfunction. - Three commands are provided:
which_methodsuggests methods.why_methodexplains a particular suggestion.rank_methodshows where a given method ranks.
- Recommendations are strongest for specialised methods (e.g.,
eventually_elim,intro_classes). The evaluation also covers user-defined methods such asrefine_vcg,autoref,seprefandsep_auto. The implementation is available on GitHub.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 19,503 worksArtificial Intelligence · 18,805 worksInformation Systems · 1,888 worksComputational Theory and Mathematics · 496 works
Cite
Cite as Yutaka Nagashima and Yilun He. 2018. PaMpeR: Proof Method Recommendation System for Isabelle/HOL. arXiv:1806.07239.
@misc{nagashima2018pamper,
title = {{PaMpeR: Proof Method Recommendation System for Isabelle/HOL}},
author = {Yutaka Nagashima and Yilun He},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1806.07239},
eprint = {1806.07239},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1806.07239}
}References
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