Small Proof Witnesses for LF

We instrument a higher-order logic programming search procedure to generate and check small proof witnesses for the Twelf system, an implementation of the logical framework LF. In particular, we extend and generalize ideas from Necula and Rahul [16] in two main ways: 1) We consider the full fragment of LF including dependent types and higher-order terms and 2) We study the use of caching of sub-proofs to further compact proof representations. Our experimental results demonstrate that many of the restrictions in previous work can be overcome and generating and checking small witnesses within Twelf provides valuable addition to its general safety infrastructure.