Active Learning of Extended Finite State Machines

Abstract : Once they have high-level models of the behavior of software components, engineers can construct better software in less time. A key problem in practice, however, is the construction of models for existing software components, for which no or only limited documentation is available. In this talk, I will present an overview of recent work by my group — done in close collaboration with the Universities of Dortmund and Uppsala — in which we use machine learning to infer state diagram models of embedded controllers and network protocols fully automatically through observation and test, that is, through black box reverse engineering.