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)
10.1145/3434333.
(In press).
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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.
Type: | Article |
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Title: | A Pre-expectation Calculus for Probabilistic Sensitivity |
DOI: | 10.1145/3434333 |
Publisher version: | https://dl.acm.org/journal/pacmpl |
Language: | English |
Keywords: | probabilistic programming, verification |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10115803 |
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