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FO-Complete Program Verification for Heap Logics

Published: January 10, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.06719v1

By: Adithya Murali , Hrishikesh Balakrishnan , Aaron Councilman and more

Potential Business Impact:

Proves computer programs are correct, even complex ones.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

We develop the first two heap logics that have implicit heaplets and that admit FO-complete program verification. The notion of FO-completeness is a theoretical guarantee that all theorems that are valid when recursive definitions are interpreted as fixpoint definitions (instead of least fixpoint) are guaranteed to be eventually proven by the system. The logics we develop are a frame logic ($\textit{FL}$) and a separation logic ($\textit{SL-FL}$) that has an alternate semantics inspired by frame logic. We show verification condition generation for FL that is amenable to FO-complete reasoning using quantifier instantiation and SMT solvers. We show $\textit{SL-FL}$ can be translated to FL in order to obtain FO-complete reasoning. We implement tools that realize our technique and show the expressiveness of our logics and the efficacy of the verification technique on a suite of benchmarks that manipulate data structures.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States

Page Count
44 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Logic in Computer Science