Aguirre, A; Barthe, G; Hsu, J; Kaminski, BL; Katoen, J-P; Matheja, C; (2021) A Pre-expectation Calculus for Probabilistic Sensitivity. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages , 5 (POPL) , Article 52. 10.1145/3434333.

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Abstract

Sensitivity properties describe how changes to the input of a program affect the output, typically by upper bounding the distance between the outputs of two runs by a monotone function of the distance between the corresponding inputs. When programs are probabilistic, the distance between outputs is a distance between distributions. The Kantorovich lifting provides a general way of defining a distance between distributions by lifting the distance of the underlying sample space; by choosing an appropriate distance on the base space, one can recover other usual probabilistic distances, such as the Total Variation distance. We develop a relational pre-expectation calculus to upper bound the Kantorovich distance between two executions of a probabilistic program. We illustrate our methods by proving algorithmic stability of a machine learning algorithm, convergence of a reinforcement learning algorithm, and fast mixing for card shuffling algorithms. We also consider some extensions: using our calculus to show convergence of Markov chains to the uniform distribution over states and an asynchronous extension to reason about pairs of program executions with different control flow.

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