Related papers: Refuting Equivalence in Probabilistic Programs wit…
We consider the problems of statically refuting equivalence and similarity of output distributions defined by a pair of probabilistic programs. Equivalence and similarity are two fundamental relational properties of probabilistic programs…
Probabilistic programming languages allow programmers to write down conditional probability distributions that represent statistical and machine learning models as programs that use observe statements. These programs are run by accumulating…
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,…
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…
Proving programs terminating is a fundamental computer science challenge. Recent research has produced powerful tools that can check a wide range of programs for termination. The analog for probabilistic programs, namely termination with…
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…
We tackle the problem of conditioning probabilistic programs on distributions of observable variables. Probabilistic programs are usually conditioned on samples from the joint data distribution, which we refer to as deterministic…
Context: Software engineering has a problem in that when we empirically evaluate competing prediction systems we obtain conflicting results. Objective: To reduce the inconsistency amongst validation study results and provide a more formal…
We target the problem of provably computing the equivalence between two complex expression trees. To this end, we formalize the problem of equivalence between two such programs as finding a set of semantics-preserving rewrite rules from one…
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…
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…
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…
Probabilistic programming is a growing area that strives to make statistical analysis more accessible, by separating probabilistic modelling from probabilistic inference. In practice this decoupling is difficult. No single inference…
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…
In mutation testing the question whether a mutant is equivalent to its program is important in order to compute the correct mutation score. Unfortunately, answering this question is not always possible and can hardly be obtained just by…
In recent years, numerous techniques were developed to automatically prove termination of different kinds of probabilistic programs. However, there are only few automated methods to disprove their termination. In this paper, we present the…
We consider the problem of testing the equality of conditional distributions of a response variable given a vector of covariates between two populations. Such a hypothesis testing problem can be motivated from various machine learning and…
The problem of determining whether a probabilistic program terminates almost surely (i.e.~with probability one) is undecidable, and actually $\Pi^0_2$-complete. For this reason, a growing literature has explored classes of programs for…
Logic programs, more specifically, Answer-set programs, can be annotated with probabilities on facts to express uncertainty. We address the problem of propagating weight annotations on facts (eg probabilities) of an ASP to its standard…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…