Formal verification of higher-order probabilistic programs: reasoning about approximation, convergence, Bayesian inference, and optimization

Author:

Sato Tetsuya1,Aguirre Alejandro2,Barthe Gilles2,Gaboardi Marco1,Garg Deepak3,Hsu Justin4

Affiliation:

1. SUNY Buffalo, USA

2. IMDEA Software Institute, Spain

3. MPI-SWS, Germany

4. University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Abstract

Probabilistic programming provides a convenient lingua franca for writing succinct and rigorous descriptions of probabilistic models and inference tasks. Several probabilistic programming languages, including Anglican, Church or Hakaru, derive their expressiveness from a powerful combination of continuous distributions, conditioning, and higher-order functions. Although very important for practical applications, these features raise fundamental challenges for program semantics and verification. Several recent works offer promising answers to these challenges, but their primary focus is on foundational semantics issues. In this paper, we take a step further by developing a suite of logics, collectively named PPV for proving properties of programs written in an expressive probabilistic higher-order language with continuous sampling operations and primitives for conditioning distributions. Our logics mimic the comfortable reasoning style of informal proofs using carefully selected axiomatizations of key results from probability theory. The versatility of our logics is illustrated through the formal verification of several intricate examples from statistics, probabilistic inference, and machine learning. We further show expressiveness by giving sound embeddings of existing logics. In particular, we do this in a parametric way by showing how the semantics idea of (unary and relational) ⊤⊤-lifting can be internalized in our logics. The soundness of PPV follows by interpreting programs and assertions in quasi-Borel spaces (QBS), a recently proposed variant of Borel spaces with a good structure for interpreting higher order probabilistic programs.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Subject

Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality,Software

Cited by 18 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Automated Verification of Higher-Order Probabilistic Programs via a Dependent Refinement Type System;Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages;2024-08-15

2. Error Credits: Resourceful Reasoning about Error Bounds for Higher-Order Probabilistic Programs;Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages;2024-08-15

3. A Nominal Approach to Probabilistic Separation Logic;Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science;2024-07-08

4. Program logic for higher-order probabilistic programs in Isabelle/HOL;Science of Computer Programming;2023-08

5. Reasoning about block-based cloud storage systems via separation logic;Theoretical Computer Science;2022-11

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