ETAPS 2019
Sat 6 - Thu 11 April 2019 Prague, Czech Republic
Tue 9 Apr 2019 11:00 - 11:30 at SUN I - SAT and SMT II Chair(s): Armin Biere

SMT solvers typically reason about universal quantifiers via e-matching: syntactic matching patterns for each quantifier prescribe shapes of ground terms whose presence in the SMT run will trigger quantifier instantiations. The effectiveness and performance of the SMT solver depend crucially on well-chosen patterns. Overly restrictive patterns cause relevant quantifier instantiations to be missed, while overly permissive patterns can cause performance degradation including non-termination if the solver gets stuck in a matching loop. Understanding and debugging such instantiation problems is an overwhelming task, due to the typically large number of quantifier instantiations and their non-trivial interactions with each other and other solver aspects. In this paper, we present the Axiom Profiler, a tool that allows users to effectively analyse instantiation problems by filtering and visualising rich logging information from SMT runs. Our tool implements novel techniques for automatically detecting matching loops and explaining why they repeat indefinitely. We have evaluated the tool on the full test suites of five existing program verifiers; our tool discovered and produced explanations of previously-unknown matching loops.