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We study discrete probabilistic programs with potentially unbounded looping behaviors over an infinite state space. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first decidability result for the problem of determining whether such a…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Mingshuai Chen , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Lutz Klinkenberg , Tobias Winkler

Generating functions, which are widely used in combinatorics and probability theory, encode function values into the coefficients of a polynomial. In this paper, we explore their use as a tractable probabilistic model, and propose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Honghua Zhang , Brendan Juba , Guy Van den Broeck

Probabilistic programs are typically normal-looking programs describing posterior probability distributions. They intrinsically code up randomized algorithms and have long been at the heart of modern machine learning and approximate…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Lutz Klinkenberg , Tobias Winkler , Mingshuai Chen , Joost-Pieter Katoen

In this chapter, we explore how (Type-2) computable distributions can be used to give both (algorithmic) sampling and distributional semantics to probabilistic programs with continuous distributions. Towards this end, we sketch an encoding…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-05 Daniel Huang , Greg Morrisett , Bas Spitters

We present an exact Bayesian inference method for inferring posterior distributions encoded by probabilistic programs featuring possibly unbounded loops. Our method is built on a denotational semantics represented by probability generating…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Lutz Klinkenberg , Christian Blumenthal , Mingshuai Chen , Darion Haase , Joost-Pieter Katoen

We present a new symbolic execution semantics of probabilistic programs that include observe statements and sampling from continuous distributions. Building on Kozen's seminal work, this symbolic semantics consists of a countable collection…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Erik Voogd , Einar Broch Johnsen , Alexandra Silva , Zachary J. Susag , Andrzej Wąsowski

This article develops a novel operational semantics for probabilistic control-flow graphs (pCFGs) of probabilistic imperative programs with random assignment and "observe" (or conditioning) statements. The semantics transforms probability…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Torben Amtoft , Anindya Banerjee

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

LLMs are widely used for code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks where they are required to generate structured output. They either need to reason about code, generate code for a given specification, or reason using programs of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Poorva Garg , Renato Lui Geh , Daniel Israel , Todd Millstein , Kyle Richardson , Guy Van den Broeck

Generative models for source code are an interesting structured prediction problem, requiring to reason about both hard syntactic and semantic constraints as well as about natural, likely programs. We present a novel model for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Marc Brockschmidt , Miltiadis Allamanis , Alexander L. Gaunt , Oleksandr Polozov

We study the semantic foundation of expressive probabilistic programming languages, that support higher-order functions, continuous distributions, and soft constraints (such as Anglican, Church, and Venture). We define a metalanguage (an…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-03-31 Sam Staton , Hongseok Yang , Chris Heunen , Ohad Kammar , Frank Wood

Testing algorithms across a wide range of problem instances is crucial to ensure the validity of any claim about one algorithm's superiority over another. However, when it comes to inference algorithms for probabilistic logic programs,…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-09-14 Paulius Dilkas , Vaishak Belle

Probability-generating function (PGF) kernels are introduced, which constitute a class of kernels supported on the unit hypersphere, for the purposes of spherical data analysis. PGF kernels generalize RBF kernels in the context of spherical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-02 Theodore Papamarkou , Alexey Lindo

We present a modular semantic account of Bayesian inference algorithms for probabilistic programming languages, as used in data science and machine learning. Sophisticated inference algorithms are often explained in terms of composition of…

A systematic study of the probability distribution of superimposed random codes is presented through the use of generating functions. Special attention is paid to the cases of either uniformly distributed but not necessarily independent or…

Databases · Computer Science 2008-06-19 Bernd Günther

We present an exact Bayesian inference method for discrete statistical models, which can find exact solutions to a large class of discrete inference problems, even with infinite support and continuous priors. To express such models, we…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Fabian Zaiser , Andrzej S. Murawski , Luke Ong

Probabilistic circuits compute multilinear polynomials that represent multivariate probability distributions. They are tractable models that support efficient marginal inference. However, various polynomial semantics have been considered in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Oliver Broadrick , Honghua Zhang , Guy Van den Broeck

Essential tasks for the verification of probabilistic programs include bounding expected outcomes and proving termination in finite expected runtime. We contribute a simple yet effective inductive synthesis approach for proving such…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Kevin Batz , Mingshuai Chen , Sebastian Junges , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Christoph Matheja

Developing explicit pseudorandom generators (PRGs) for prominent categories of Boolean functions is a key focus in computational complexity theory. In this paper, we investigate the PRGs against the functions of degree-$d$ polynomial…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Penghui Yao , Mingnan Zhao

A characterization of finitely generated shift-invariant subspaces is given when generators are g-minimal. An algorithm is given for the determination of the coefficients in the well known representation of the Fourier transform of an…

Classical Analysis and ODEs · Mathematics 2019-06-18 K. S. Kazarian
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