Sciduction: Combining induction, deduction, and structure for verification and synthesis

Even with impressive advances in formal verification, certain major challenges remain. Chief amongst these are environment modeling, incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision problems. In this position paper, we contend that these challenges can be tackled by integrating traditional, deductive methods with inductive inference (learning from examples) using hypotheses about system structure. We present sciduction, a formalization of such an integration, show how it can tackle hard problems in verification and synthesis, and outline directions for future work.