Related papers: Approximations in Probabilistic Programs
In many branches of engineering, Banach contraction mapping theorem is employed to establish the convergence of certain deterministic algorithms. Randomized versions of these algorithms have been developed that have proved useful in…
We extend the Longstaff-Schwartz algorithm for approximately solving optimal stopping problems on high-dimensional state spaces. We reformulate the optimal stopping problem for Markov processes in discrete time as a generalized statistical…
An important question for a probabilistic program is whether the probability mass of all its diverging runs is zero, that is that it terminates "almost surely". Proving that can be hard, and this paper presents a new method for doing so; it…
In this paper we consider a transformer with an $n$-gram structure, such as the one underlying ChatGPT. The transformer provides next word probabilities, which can be used to generate word sequences. We consider methods for computing word…
A classic result in formal language theory is the equivalence among non-counting, or aperiodic, regular languages, and languages defined through star-free regular expressions, or first-order logic. Past attempts to extend this result beyond…
Predictive models are fundamental to engineering reliable software systems. However, designing conservative, computable approximations for the behavior of programs (static analyses) remains a difficult and error-prone process for modern…
Higher-order probabilistic programming languages allow programmers to write sophisticated models in machine learning and statistics in a succinct and structured way, but step outside the standard measure-theoretic formalization of…
Virtual assistants make use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to help users answer entity-centric queries. However, spoken entity recognition is a difficult problem, due to the large number of frequently-changing named entities. In…
The run time complexity of state-of-the-art inference algorithms in graph-based dependency parsing is super-linear in the number of input words (n). Recently, pruning algorithms for these models have shown to cut a large portion of the…
We consider the problem of estimating the asymptotic variance of a function defined on a Markov chain, an important step for statistical inference of the stationary mean. We design a novel recursive estimator that requires $O(1)$…
We study the approximation of a Markov chain on a reduced state space, for both discrete- and continuous-time Markov chains. In this context, we extend the existing theory of formal error bounds for the approximated transient distributions.…
The paper is concerned with the equilibrium distributions of continuous-time density dependent Markov processes on the integers. These distributions are known typically to be approximately normal, and the approximation error, as measured in…
We study fixpoints of operators on lattices. To this end we introduce the notion of an approximation of an operator. We order approximations by means of a precision ordering. We show that each lattice operator O has a unique most precise or…
Arguing for the need to combine declarative and probabilistic programming, B\'ar\'any et al. (TODS 2017) recently introduced a probabilistic extension of Datalog as a "purely declarative probabilistic programming language." We revisit this…
We define a novel, extensional, three-valued semantics for higher-order logic programs with negation. The new semantics is based on interpreting the types of the source language as three-valued Fitting-monotonic functions at all levels of…
We study the almost sure convergence of the Stochastic Approximation algorithm to the fixed point $x^\star$ of a nonlinear operator under a negative drift condition and a general noise sequence with finite $p$-th moment for some $p > 1$.…
In this work, we consider the almost-sure termination problem for probabilistic programs that asks whether a given probabilistic program terminates with probability 1. Scalable approaches for program analysis often rely on modularity as…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
We formulate the loop-free, binary superoptimization task as a stochastic search problem. The competing constraints of transformation correctness and performance improvement are encoded as terms in a cost function, and a Markov Chain Monte…
Several recent publications investigated Markov-chain modelling of linear optimization by a $(1,\lambda)$-ES, considering both unconstrained and linearly constrained optimization, and both constant and varying step size. All of them assume…