We present Generic Refinement Types : a way to write modular higher-order specifications that abstract invariants over function contracts, while preserving automatic SMT-decidable verification. We show how generic refinements let us write a variety of modular higher-order specifications, including specifications for Rust’s traits which abstract over the concrete refinements that hold for different trait implementations. We formalize generic refinements in a core calculus and show how to synthesize the generic instantiations algorithmically at usage sites via a combination of syntactic unification and constraint solving. We give semantics to generic refinements via the intuition that they correspond to ghost parameters , and we formalize this intuition via a type-preserving translation into the polymorphic contract calculus to establish the soundness of generic refinements. Finally, we evaluate generic refinements by implementing them in F luk and using it for two case studies. First, we show how generic refinements let us write modular specifications for Rust’s vector indexing API that lets us statically verify the bounds safety of a variety of vector-manipulating benchmarks from the literature. Second, we use generic refinements to refine Rust’s diesel ORM library to track the semantics of the database queries issued by client applications, and hence, statically enforce data-dependent access-control policies in several database-backed web applications.

@article{paperbot3241,
  title = {Generic Refinement Types},
  author = {Nico Lehmann and Cole Kurashige and Nikhil Akiti and Niroop Krishnakumar and Ranjit Jhala},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {9},
  number = {POPL},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3704885}
}