# Correct Approximation of IEEE 754 Floating-Point Arithmetic for Program Verification

## TL;DR

This paper develops and proves the correctness of algorithms to accurately bound floating-point computations under IEEE 754 standards, aiding formal program verification involving floating-point arithmetic.

## Contribution

It introduces the first formally verified filtering algorithms for bounding floating-point variables considering all IEEE 754 rounding modes, even with partial mode knowledge.

## Key findings

- Algorithms precisely bound floating-point variables
- Correctness is formally proven for all IEEE 754 rounding modes
- Supports verification of floating-point programs with partial rounding mode information

## Abstract

Verification of programs using floating-point arithmetic is challenging on several accounts. One of the difficulties of reasoning about such programs is due to the peculiarities of floating-point arithmetic: rounding errors, infinities, non-numeric objects (NaNs), signed zeroes, denormal numbers, different rounding modes, etc. One possibility to reason about floating-point arithmetic is to model a program computation path by means of a set of ternary constraints of the form z = x op y and use constraint propagation techniques to infer new information on the variables' possible values. In this setting, we define and prove the correctness of algorithms to precisely bound the value of one of the variables x, y or z, starting from the bounds known for the other two. We do this for each of the operations and for each rounding mode defined by the IEEE 754 binary floating-point standard, even in the case the rounding mode in effect is only partially known. This is the first time that such so-called filtering algorithms are defined and their correctness is formally proved. This is an important slab for paving the way to formal verification of programs that use floating-point arithmetics.