dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaOutrunning Big KATs: Efficient Decision Procedures for Variants of GKAT
| Authors | Cheng Zhang, Qiancheng Fu, Hang Ji, Ines Santacruz Del Valle, Alexandra Silva, Marco Gaboardi |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.09986vv2 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09986 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Abstract
This paper presents several efficient decision procedures for trace equivalence of GKAT automata, which make use of on-the-fly symbolic techniques via SAT solvers. To demonstrate applicability of our algorithms, we designed symbolic derivatives for CF-GKAT, a practical system based on GKAT designed to validate control-flow transformations. We implemented the algorithms in Rust and evaluated them on both randomly generated benchmarks and real-world control-flow transformations. Indeed, we observed order-of-magnitude performance improvements against existing implementations for both KAT and CF-GKAT. Notably, our experiments also revealed a bug in Ghidra, an industry-standard decompiler, highlighting the practical viability of these systems.
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"date_created": "2026-02-17T05:53:24.226000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-02-17T05:53:24.226000Z",
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"abstract": "This paper presents several efficient decision procedures for trace equivalence of GKAT automata, which make use of on-the-fly symbolic techniques via SAT solvers. To demonstrate applicability of our algorithms, we designed symbolic derivatives for CF-GKAT, a practical system based on GKAT designed to validate control-flow transformations. We implemented the algorithms in Rust and evaluated them on both randomly generated benchmarks and real-world control-flow transformations. Indeed, we observed order-of-magnitude performance improvements against existing implementations for both KAT and CF-GKAT. Notably, our experiments also revealed a bug in Ghidra, an industry-standard decompiler, highlighting the practical viability of these systems.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.09986",
"authors": [
"Cheng Zhang",
"Qiancheng Fu",
"Hang Ji",
"Ines Santacruz Del Valle",
"Alexandra Silva",
"Marco Gaboardi"
],
"categories": [
"cs.PL",
"cs.LO"
],
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"title": "Outrunning Big KATs: Efficient Decision Procedures for Variants of GKAT",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09986",
"version": "v2"
},
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"execution_id": "b9feaeba-ccb9-4eff-9f4b-9fb24006ae8f",
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"variant": "snapshot-2026-01-17",
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