Related papers: Inter-procedural Two-Variable Herbrand Equalities
Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
Conditioning is a key feature in probabilistic programming to enable modeling the influence of data (also known as observations) to the probability distribution described by such programs. Determining the posterior distribution is also…
It is common practice in statistical data analysis to perform data-driven variable selection and derive statistical inference from the resulting model. Such inference enjoys none of the guarantees that classical statistical theory provides…
Many random combinatorial objects have a component structure whose joint distribution is equal to that of a process of mutually independent random variables, conditioned on the value of a weighted sum of the variables. It is interesting to…
We propose a purely extensional semantics for higher-order logic programming. In this semantics program predicates denote sets of ordered tuples, and two predicates are equal iff they are equal as sets. Moreover, every program has a unique…
In this extended abstract, we discuss the opportunity to formally verify that inference systems for probabilistic programming guarantee good performance. In particular, we focus on hybrid inference systems that combine exact and approximate…
Runtime efficiency and termination are crucial properties in the studies of program verification. Instead of dealing with these issues in an ad hoc manner, it would be useful to develop a robust framework in which such properties are…
Probabilistic programs are a powerful and convenient approach to formalise distributions over system executions. A classical verification problem for probabilistic programs is temporal inference: to compute the likelihood that the execution…
The inferential model (IM) framework provides valid prior-free probabilistic inference by focusing on predicting unobserved auxiliary variables. But, efficient IM-based inference can be challenging when the auxiliary variable is of higher…
Hyperproperties govern the behavior of a system or systems across multiple executions, and are being recognized as an important extension of regular temporal properties. So far, such properties have resisted comprehensive treatment by…
Recently, there has been considerable progress on designing algorithms with provable guarantees -- typically using linear algebraic methods -- for parameter learning in latent variable models. But designing provable algorithms for inference…
Probabilistic programs provide an expressive representation language for generative models. Given a probabilistic program, we are interested in the task of posterior inference: estimating a latent variable given a set of observed variables.…
We consider universal inference in variance components models, focusing on settings where the parameter is near or at the boundary of the parameter set. Two cases, which are not handled by existing state-of-the-art methods, are of…
Implicit variables of a mathematical program are variables which do not need to be optimized but are used to model feasibility conditions. They frequently appear in several different problem classes of optimization theory comprising bilevel…
This work proposes a non-iterative strategy for missing value imputations which is guided by similarity between observations, but instead of explicitly determining distances or nearest neighbors, it assigns observations to overlapping…
We develop a principled approach to obtain exact computer-aided worst-case guarantees on the performance of second-order optimization methods on classes of univariate functions. We first present a generic technique to derive interpolation…
The front-door criterion can be used to identify and compute causal effects despite the existence of unmeasured confounders between a treatment and outcome. However, the key assumptions -- (i) the existence of a variable (or set of…
Estimating hyperparameters has been a long-standing problem in machine learning. We consider the case where the task at hand is modeled as the solution to an optimization problem. Here the exact gradient with respect to the hyperparameters…
Hoare-style inference rules for program constructs permit the copying of expressions and tests from program text into logical contexts. It is known that this requires care even for sequential programs but much more serious issues arise with…