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Related papers: Reasoning about Recursive Probabilistic Programs

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In this abstract we study the resource consumption of quantum programs. Specifically, we focus on the expected runtime of programs and, inspired by recent methods for probabilistic programs, we develop a calculus \`a la weakest precondition…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Federico Olmedo , Alejandro Díaz-Caro

Consider testing multiple hypotheses in the setting where the p-values of all hypotheses are unknown and thus have to be approximated using Monte Carlo simulations. One class of algorithms published in the literature for this scenario…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-16 Georg Hahn

We study the problem of automated hypersafety verification of infinite-state recursive programs. We propose an infinite class of product programs, specifically designed with recursion in mind, that reduce the hypersafety verification of a…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Ruotong Cheng , Azadeh Farzan

This paper considers the computational hardness of computing expected outcomes and deciding (universal) (positive) almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs. It is shown that computing lower and upper bounds of expected outcomes is…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-06-08 Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen

We study weakest precondition reasoning about the (co)variance of outcomes and the variance of run-times of probabilistic programs with conditioning. For outcomes, we show that approximating (co)variances is computationally more difficult…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2016-06-28 Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Christoph Matheja

The weakest pre-expectation calculus has been proved to be a mature theory to analyze quantitative properties of probabilistic and nondeterministic programs. We present an automatic method for proving quantitative linear properties on any…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2010-06-29 Damián Barsotti , Nicolás Wolovick

Given an imprecise probabilistic model over a continuous space, computing lower/upper expectations is often computationally hard to achieve, even in simple cases. Because expectations are essential in decision making and risk analysis,…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-06-09 L. Utkin , S. Destercke

This article presents a type-based analysis for deriving upper bounds on the expected execution cost of probabilistic programs. The analysis is naturally compositional, parametric in the cost model, and supports higher order functions and…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Di Wang , David M Kahn , Jan Hoffmann

The aim of a probabilistic output analysis is to derive a probability distribution of possible output values for a program from a probability distribution of its input. We present a method for performing static output analysis, based on…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2015-09-30 Mads Rosendahl , Maja H. Kirkeby

The objective of this paper is to present general, mechanically verified, refinement rules for reasoning about recursive programs and while loops in the context of concurrency. Unlike many approaches to concurrency, we do not assume that…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ian J. Hayes , Larissa A. Meinicke , Cliff B. Jones

Finite-precision floating point arithmetic unavoidably introduces rounding errors which are traditionally bounded using a worst-case analysis. However, worst-case analysis might be overly conservative because worst-case errors can be…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-12-11 Fredrik Dahlqvist , Rocco Salvia , George A Constantinides

The extensive deployment of probabilistic algorithms has radically changed our perspective on several well-established computational notions. Correctness is probably the most basic one. While a typical probabilistic program cannot be said…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Francesco A. Genco , Giuseppe Primiero

We study termination of higher-order probabilistic functional programs with recursion, stochastic conditioning and sampling from continuous distributions. Reasoning about the termination probability of programs with continuous distributions…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Raven Beutner , Luke Ong

We show that the standard computational pipeline of probabilistic programming systems (PPSs) can be inefficient for estimating expectations and introduce the concept of expectation programming to address this. In expectation programming,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Tim Reichelt , Adam Goliński , Luke Ong , Tom Rainforth

We consider the problem of expected cost analysis over nondeterministic probabilistic programs, which aims at automated methods for analyzing the resource-usage of such programs. Previous approaches for this problem could only handle…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Peixin Wang , Hongfei Fu , Amir Kafshdar Goharshady , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Xudong Qin , Wenjun Shi

We consider the problem of refuting equivalence of probabilistic programs, i.e., the problem of proving that two probabilistic programs induce different output distributions. We study this problem in the context of programs with…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady , Petr Novotný , Đorđe Žikelić

The paper extends the expectation transformer based analysis of higher-order probabilistic programs to the quantum higher-order setting. The quantum language we are considering can be seen as an extension of PCF, featuring unbounded…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Martin Avanzini , Alejandro Díaz-Caro , Emmanuel Hainry , Romain Péchoux

Probabilistic programs encode stochastic models as ordinary-looking programs with primitives for sampling numbers from predefined distributions and conditioning. Their applications include, among many others, machine learning and modeling…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Dominik Geißler , Tobias Winkler

The standard approach to analyzing the asymptotic complexity of probabilistic programs is based on studying the asymptotic growth of certain expected values (such as the expected termination time) for increasing input size. We argue that…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Michal Ajdarów , Antonín Kučera

Probabilistic timed automata are classical timed automata extended with discrete probability distributions over edges. We introduce clock-dependent probabilistic timed automata, a variant of probabilistic timed automata in which transition…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2017-07-17 Jeremy Sproston