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In this work, we study the fully automated inference of expected result values of probabilistic programs in the presence of natural programming constructs such as procedures, local variables and recursion. While crucial, capturing these…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Martin Avanzini , Georg Moser , Michael Schaper

We introduce and demonstrate a new approach to inference in expressive probabilistic programming languages based on particle Markov chain Monte Carlo. Our approach is simple to implement and easy to parallelize. It applies to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-10 Frank Wood , Jan Willem van de Meent , Vikash Mansinghka

Discrete probabilistic programs (DPPs) provide a highly expressive formalism for compactly defining arbitrary finite probabilistic models. This expressivity comes at a price: DPP inference is PSPACE-hard. In this work, we show that DPP…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Benedikt Peterseim , Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg

Spreadsheet workbook contents are simple programs. Because of this, probabilistic programming techniques can be used to perform Bayesian inversion of spreadsheet computations. What is more, existing execution engines in spreadsheet…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-15 Mike Wu , Yura Perov , Frank Wood , Hongseok Yang

The idea of computer vision as the Bayesian inverse problem to computer graphics has a long history and an appealing elegance, but it has proved difficult to directly implement. Instead, most vision tasks are approached via complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-07-02 Vikash K. Mansinghka , Tejas D. Kulkarni , Yura N. Perov , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Probabilistic programs are key to deal with uncertainty in e.g. controller synthesis. They are typically small but intricate. Their development is complex and error prone requiring quantitative reasoning over a myriad of alternative…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Milan Češka , Christian Hensel , Sebastian Junges , Joost-Pieter Katoen

Morgan and McIver's weakest pre-expectation framework is one of the most well-established methods for deductive verification of probabilistic programs. Roughly, the idea is to generalize binary state assertions to real-valued expectations,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Jialu Bao , Nitesh Trivedi , Drashti Pathak , Justin Hsu , Subhajit Roy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Sanjeev Arora , Rong Ge , Frederic Koehler , Tengyu Ma , Ankur Moitra

Imprecise probability is concerned with uncertainty about which probability distributions to use. It has applications in robust statistics and machine learning. We look at programming language models for imprecise probability. Our…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Jack Liell-Cock , Sam Staton

Probabilistic Programming Languages (PPLs) are a powerful tool in machine learning, allowing highly expressive generative models to be expressed succinctly. They couple complex inference algorithms, implemented by the language, with an…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Alexander Collins , Vinod Grover

A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2013-12-17 Luc De Raedt , Angelika Kimmig

In probabilistic programming, the inference problem asks to determine a program's posterior distribution conditioned on its "observe" instructions. Inference is challenging, especially when exact rather than approximate results are…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Geißler , Tobias Winkler

We present a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction. Parsing algorithms can be represented directly as deduction systems, and a single deduction engine can interpret such deduction systems so as…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Stuart M. Shieber , Yves Schabes , Fernando C. N. Pereira

One of the main challenges in the analysis of probabilistic programs is to compute invariant properties that summarise loop behaviours. Automation of invariant generation is still at its infancy and most of the times targets only expected…

Symbolic Computation · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Ezio Bartocci , Laura Kovács , Miroslav Stankovič

In this work we demonstrate how to automate parts of the infectious disease-control policy-making process via performing inference in existing epidemiological models. The kind of inference tasks undertaken include computing the posterior…

Artificial intelligence has recently experienced remarkable advances, fueled by large models, vast datasets, accelerated hardware, and, last but not least, the transformative power of differentiable programming. This new programming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Mathieu Blondel , Vincent Roulet

Probabilistic logic programs are logic programs where some facts hold with a specified probability. Here, we investigate these programs with a causal framework that allows counterfactual queries. Learning the program structure from…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Kilian Rückschloß , Felix Weitkämper

Building robust, interpretable, and secure AI system requires quantifying and representing uncertainty under a probabilistic perspective to mimic human cognitive abilities. However, probabilistic computation presents significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Hengyuan Ma , Yang Qi , Li Zhang , Wenlian Lu , Jianfeng Feng

In various applications, probabilistic forecasts are required to quantify the inherent uncertainty associated with the forecast. However, numerous modern forecasting methods are still designed to create deterministic forecasts. Transforming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Kaleb Phipps , Benedikt Heidrich , Marian Turowski , Moritz Wittig , Ralf Mikut , Veit Hagenmeyer

Probabilistic programming is becoming increasingly popular thanks to its ability to specify problems with a certain degree of uncertainty. In this work, we focus on term rewriting, a well-known computational formalism. In particular, we…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Germán Vidal