Related papers: A New Proof Rule for Almost-Sure Termination
A novel lower bound is introduced for the full rank probability of random finite field matrices, where a number of elements with known location are identically zero, and remaining elements are chosen independently of each other, uniformly…
We propose a simple technique for verifying probabilistic models whose transition probabilities are parametric. The key is to replace parametric transitions by nondeterministic choices of extremal values. Analysing the resulting…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) are a class of stochastic processes with applications in several fields of applied mathematics spanning from mathematical modeling of physical phenomena to computational methods. A PDMP is…
Low-rank matrix completion (LRMC) problems arise in a wide variety of applications. Previous theory mainly provides conditions for completion under missing-at-random samplings. This paper studies deterministic conditions for completion. An…
We consider synchronizing properties of Markov decision processes (MDP), viewed as generators of sequences of probability distributions over states. A probability distribution is p-synchronizing if the probability mass is at least p in some…
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…
Determining whether a given program terminates is the quintessential undecidable problem. Algorithms for termination analysis are divided into two groups: (1) algorithms with strong behavioral guarantees that work in limited circumstances…
The classical technique for proving termination of a generic sequential computer program involves the synthesis of a ranking function for each loop of the program. Linear ranking functions are particularly interesting because many…
This papers deals with the constrained discounted control of piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMPs) in general Borel spaces. The control variable acts on the jump rate and transition measure, and the goal is to minimize the total…
We consider the problem of inferring the probability distribution associated with a language, given data consisting of an infinite sequence of elements of the languge. We do this under two assumptions on the algorithms concerned: (i) like a…
We study the problem of sequentially predicting properties of a probabilistic model and its next outcome over an infinite horizon, with the goal of ensuring that the predictions incur only finitely many errors with probability 1. We…
We derive explicit upper bounds for the $\bar{d}$-distance between a chain of infinite order and its canonical $k$-steps Markov approximation. Our proof is entirely constructive and involves a "coupling from the past" argument. The new…
We study the problem of bounding the posterior distribution of discrete probabilistic programs with unbounded support, loops, and conditioning. Loops pose the main difficulty in this setting: even if exact Bayesian inference is possible,…
We study the problem of deciding universal termination of linear and affine loops over the reals in the bit-model of real computation. We show that both problems are as close to decidable as one can expect them to be: there exist sound…
We consider the problem of estimating the total probability of all symbols that appear with a given frequency in a string of i.i.d. random variables with unknown distribution. We focus on the regime in which the block length is large yet no…
In considering the reliability of numerical programs, it is normal to "limit our study to the semantics dealing with numerical precision" (Martel, 2005). On the other hand, there is a great deal of work on the reliability of programs that…
The general setting of this work is the constraint-based synthesis of termination arguments. We consider a restricted class of programs called lasso programs. The termination argument for a lasso program is a pair of a ranking function and…
Nearly linear recurrences are a generalisation of linear recurrences and are instances of linear time-invariant systems in control theory and linear constraint loops in program analysis. In this paper we formulate the Positivity Problem for…
Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes…
We consider the problem of approximating the reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDP) with uncountable (continuous) state and action spaces. While there are algorithms that, for special classes of such MDP, provide a…