Programming Languages & Verification

The group’s research focuses on the principles, design and implementation of programming languages and on foundational techniques and practical tools for analyzing, testing, and verifying programs against their correctness specifications.

Recent research has developed techniques for verifying compilers and other critical software, and tools for testing and/or verifying concurrent systems.

News

Derek Dreyer achieves a publication record!

February 2026

MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer has published a total of 61 papers across all four SIGPLAN conference---a new record!

Most downloaded PACMPL paper of 2025

January 2026

The paper "Tree Borrows" was in the year 2025 the single most downloaded article from all issues of the entire PACMPL journal.

Max Planck researchers publish 5 papers at POPL 2026!

January 2026

Max Planck researchers have authored nine papers to appear in POPL 2026.

Joël Ouaknine receives LICS test-of-time award

June 2025

Joël Ouaknine has received the 2025 LICS test-of-time award for his 2005 paper on Metric Temporal Logic.

Derek Dreyer and collaborators receive three Distinguished Paper Awards at PLDI'25 and POPL'25

June 2025

Derek Dreyer and collaborators received Distinguished Paper Awards for two papers at PLDI 2025 and one at POPL 2025.

All News

Recent projects

Recent software

genmc

Generic model checker for concurrent C programs

POROUS

An invariant builder and reachability checker for affine programs.

Papers

A Recipe for Modular Verification of Generic Tree Traversals.

Laila Elbeheiry, Michael Sammler, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer, Deepak Garg.
CPP 2026.

Bounded Treewidth, Multiple Context-Free Grammars, and Downward Closures.

C. Aiswarya, Pascal Baumann, Prakash Saivasan, Lia Schütze, Georg Zetzsche.
POPL 2026.

Endangered by the Language But Saved by the Compiler: Robust Safety via Semantic Back-Translation.

Niklas Mück, Aïna Linn Georges, Derek Dreyer, Deepak Garg, Michael Sammler.
POPL 2026.

General Decidability Results for Systems with Continuous Counters.

A. R. Balasubramanian, Matthew Hague, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche.
POPL 2026.

Expressive Equivalence Between Decidable Freeze and Metric Timed Temporal Logics.

Hsi-Ming Ho, Shankara Narayanan Krishna, Khushraj Madnani, Rupak Majumdar, Paritosh K. Pandya.
CONCUR 2025.

All papers

People

Faculty

Björn Brandenburg

Derek Dreyer

Deepak Garg

Rupak Majumdar

Joel Ouaknine

Anne-Kathrin Schmuck

Viktor Vafeiadis

Georg Zetzsche

Research Group Leaders

Sadegh Soudjani

Mikhail Starchak

Affiliated Faculty

Robert Harper
(External Scientific Member)

Anthony Lin
(Max Planck Fellow)

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