Related papers: Combining and Relating Control Effects and their S…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…
Alignment has quickly become a default ingredient in LLM development, with techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback making models act safely, follow instructions, and perform ever-better on complex tasks. While these…
Type systems usually characterize the shape of values but not their free variables. However, there are many desirable safety properties one could guarantee if one could track how references can escape. For example, one may implement…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
The Curry-Howard correspondence is about a relationship between types and programs on the one hand and propositions and proofs on the other. The implications for programming language design and program verification is an active field of…
Algebraic effects & handlers are a modular approach for modeling side-effects in functional programming. Their syntax is defined in terms of a signature of effectful operations, encoded as a functor, that are plugged into the free monad;…
Recently, we have proposed two complementary approaches, top-down and bottom-up, to multilevel supervisory control of discrete-event systems. In this paper, we compare and combine these approaches. The combined approach has strong features…
We formalize and analyze a new problem in formal language theory termed control improvisation. Given a specification language, the problem is to produce an improviser, a probabilistic algorithm that randomly generates words in the language,…
We observe that the various formulations of the operational semantics of Constraint Handling Rules proposed over the years fall into a spectrum ranging from the analytical to the pragmatic. While existing analytical formulations facilitate…
Complex software systems evolve frequently, e.g., when introducing new features or fixing bugs during maintenance. However, understanding the impact of such changes on system behavior is often difficult. Many approaches have thus been…
Two very basic constructions involving experimental procedures are the formation of coarse-grained versions of experiments, and the formation of branching sequential experiments. The latter allow for the conditioning of states on the…
This paper describes how to verify a parser for regular expressions in a functional programming language using predicate transformer semantics for a variety of effects. Where our previous work in this area focused on the semantics for a…
Compositionality is a widely discussed property of natural languages, although its exact definition has been elusive. We focus on the proposal that compositionality can be assessed by measuring meaning-form correlation. We analyze…
In distributed systems where strong consistency is costly when not impossible, causal consistency provides a valuable abstraction to represent program executions as partial orders. In addition to the sequential program order of each…
In distributed synthesis, we generate a set of process implementations that, together, accomplish an objective against all possible behaviors of the environment. A lot of recent work has focussed on systems with causal memory, i.e., sets of…
Many optimal control problems exhibit a peculiar behavior that is not completely understood, the Fuller Phenomenon. In a naive way, this phenomenon can be described as the accumulation of discontinuities in the control function. In this…
We present a new method for inferring complexity properties for a class of programs in the form of flowcharts annotated with loop information. Specifically, our method can (soundly and completely) decide if computed values are polynomially…
Monads in category theory are algebraic structures that can be used to model computational effects in programming languages. We show how the notion of "centre", and more generally "centrality", i.e. the property for an effect to commute…
We consider a class of optimal control problems that arise in connection with optimal advertising under uncertainty. Two main features appear in the model: a delay in the control variable driving the state dynamics; a mean-field term both…
Episodic control provides a highly sample-efficient method for reinforcement learning while enforcing high memory and computational requirements. This work proposes a simple heuristic for reducing these requirements, and an application to…