6th International Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence and
fOrmal VERification, Logic,
Automata, and sYnthesis

The increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence techniques in safety-critical systems, employed in real world scenarios, requires the design of reliable, robust, and verifiable methodologies. Artificial Intelligence systems employed in such applications need to provide formal guarantees about their safety, increasing the need for a close interaction between the Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods scientific communities, and possibly leading to the proposal of novel neurosymbolic approaches.

To witness this increasing need, tools and methodologies integrating Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence, and more broadly symbolic and sub-symbolic solutions, are getting more and more attention, especially considering the wide-range and pervasive applications of machine and deep learning models.

The workshop is the main official initiative supported by the OVERLAY group. The event aims at establishing a stable, long-term scientific forum on relevant topics connected to the relationships between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods, by providing a stimulating environment where researchers can discuss about opportunities and challenges at the border of the two areas.

Important goals of the workshop are (i) to encourage the ongoing interaction between the formal methods and artificial intelligence communities, (ii) to identify innovative tools and methodologies, and (iii) to elicit a discussion on open issues and new challenges.

This year edition will be held on November 28th and 29th, 2024, in Bolzano, Italy.

Invited speaker

Andrea Micheli

Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

Title

Expressiveness, Python Libraries and Reinforcement Learning: a Research Journey to Make Temporal Planning more Practical

Abstract

Temporal planning is the problem of synthesizing a course of actions to reach a desired goal in a formally-modeled system where time and temporal constraints are present. Among the various classes of automated planning, temporal planning has several natural applications, ranging from robotics, to flexible manufacturing and logistics. However, temporal planning techniques are not as well formalized and understood as other forms of planning, and off-the-shelf planners are often inadequate (due to expressivity and/or scalability limitations) to tackle real-world problems.

In this talk, I will present my research journey in the area of automated temporal planning. Starting from the challenges we encountered in different research projects, I will discuss how we strived (and are striving!) to make temporal planning more applicable and scalable for practical applications. I will outline the techniques and features we developed over the years and I will summarize the results of the AIPlan4EU project, where we built an open-source infrastructure to represent, manipulate and solve several classes of planning problems (including temporal ones). Finally, I will also present the key ideas underneath the STEP-RL project, my ERC starting grant, which started this year and aims at combining automated temporal planning and reinforcement learning to specialize temporal planners for specific domains.

Bio

Andrea Micheli is the head of the "Planning Scheduling and Optimization" research unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy. His research focuses on the development and technology transfer of automated planning technologies. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Trento in 2016. His PhD thesis titled "Planning and Scheduling in Temporally Uncertain Domains'' won several awards including the EurAI Best Dissertation Award and the honorable mention at the ICAPS Best Dissertation award. He currently works in the field of temporal planning and is the main developer of the TAMER planner (tamer.fbk.eu). He is also lead developer of the pysmt open-source project aiming at providing a standard Python API for satisfiability modulo theory solvers. Andrea coordinated the AIPlan4EU project aiming to remove the access barriers to automated planning technology and to bring such technology to the European AI On-Demand Platform. He authored more than 30 papers in the Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence fields. Andrea recently won an ERC Starting Grant for researching novel solutions in the combination of temporal planning and reinforcement learning.

Call for contributions

We accept extended abstracts (5 pages + references) focusing on the interaction between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods and on the issue of symbolic/sub-symbolic integration. Invited talks will complement the presentations of contributed papers.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• automata theory
• automated reasoning
• automated planning and scheduling
• controller synthesis
• formal specification languages
• formal verification
• game theory
• hybrid and discrete systems
• logics in computer science
• neurosymbolic approaches
• logics for neural networks
• neural networks for logic
• reactive synthesis
• runtime verification and monitoring
• satisfiability modulo theories and theorem proving
• specification and verification of machine/deep learning systems
• tools and applications

Contributed papers can present recent results at the border of the two fields, new research directions, challenges and perspectives. Presentation of results recently published in other scientific journals or conferences is also welcome.

We plan to include all papers in the Proceedings of the event, published at CEUR Workshop Proceedings . CEUR WS proceedings are archival proceedings indexed by DBLP and Scopus.

Submissions

Submitted papers should not exceed five (5) pages plus references. Authors are asked to use the Overlay-specific CEURART LaTeX style, which is available here. Authors of accepted papers will have the possibility to extend their submissions for the final camera-ready version to eight (8) pages plus references.

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via EasyChair at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=overlay2024 .

Registration and participation fees

OVERLAY 2024 participation is subject to registration but is free of charge.

Information about how to register will be available in due time.

Venue

The workshop will take place at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, in the main building in Piazza Università 1, just in the middle of the wonderful historical city center.

Information about how to reach Bolzano and the venue will be published soon.

Program Committee

Chairs

• Daniele Porello • University of Genova, Italy
• Cosimo Vinci • University of Salento, Italy
• Matteo Zavatteri • University of Padova, Italy

PC Members

• Aniello Murano • University of Naples "Federico II", Italy
• Florian Bruse • Universität Kassel, Germany
• Nicolas Troquard • Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy
• Andrea Orlandini • ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
• Carlo Taticchi • University of Perugia, Italy
• Laura Giordano • Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
• Bettina Könighofer • Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Enrico Tronci • Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Paolo Baldi • University of Salento, Italy
• Federico Mari • University of Rome Foro Italico, Italy
• Nicola Gigante • Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Michael Sioutis • University of Montpellier/CNRS, France
• Emilio Incerto • IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy
• Vadim Malvone • Télécom Paris, France
• Michel Reniers • Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
• Ruben Becker • Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy
• Nicolò Navarin • University of Padova, Italy
• Stefano Tonetta • Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
• Carla Piazza • University of Udine, Italy
• Sasha Rubin • The University of Sydney, Australia
• Laura Nenzi • University of Trieste, Italy
• Eleonora Giunchiglia • Imperial College London, U.K.

Local Organization

Nicola Gigante • Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Contacts

For more information email to any of the program chairs.