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PLDI 2020
Mon 15 - Fri 19 June 2020

Synchronous modeling is at the heart of programming languages like
Lustre, Esterel, or Scade used routinely for implementing safety
critical control software, e.g., fly-by-wire and engine control in
planes. However, to date these languages have had limited modern
support for modeling uncertainty — probabilistic aspects of the
software's environment or behavior — even though modeling
uncertainty is a primary activity when designing a control system.

In this paper we present ProbZelus the first synchronous probabilistic
programming language. ProbZelus conservatively provides the
facilities of a synchronous language to write control software, with
probabilistic constructs to model uncertainties and perform
inference-in-the-loop.

We present the design and implementation of the language. We propose a
measure-theoretic semantics of probabilistic stream functions and a
simple type discipline to separate deterministic and probabilistic
expressions. We demonstrate a semantics-preserving compilation into a
first-order functional language that lends itself to a simple
presentation of inference algorithms for streaming models. We also
redesign the delayed sampling inference algorithm to provide efficient
streaming inference. Together with an evaluation on several reactive
applications, our results demonstrate that ProbZelus enables the
design of reactive probabilistic applications and efficient, bounded
memory inference.

Fri 19 Jun

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

05:00 - 06:00
Probabilistic ProgrammingPLDI Research Papers at PLDI Research Papers live stream
Chair(s): Sasa Misailovic University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

YouTube lightning session video

05:00
20m
Talk
Proving Almost-Sure Termination by Omega-Regular Decomposition
PLDI Research Papers
Jianhui Chen Tsinghua University, China, Fei He Tsinghua University, China
05:20
20m
Talk
λPSI: Exact Inference for Higher-Order Probabilistic Programs
PLDI Research Papers
Timon Gehr ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Samuel Steffen ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Martin Vechev ETH Zurich, Switzerland
05:40
20m
Talk
Reactive Probabilistic Programming
PLDI Research Papers
Guillaume Baudart IBM Research, Louis Mandel IBM Research, Eric Atkinson Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, Benjamin Sherman Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, Marc Pouzet École normale supérieure, Michael Carbin Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
DOI Pre-print Media Attached