19,625 research outputs found
Formal verification of higher-order probabilistic programs
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 combined features raise fundamental
challenges for program semantics and verification. Several recent works offer
promising answers to these challenges, but their primary focus is on semantical
issues.
In this paper, we take a step further and we develop a set of program logics,
named PPV, for proving properties of programs written in an expressive
probabilistic higher-order language with continuous distributions and operators
for conditioning distributions by real-valued functions. Pleasingly, our
program logics retain the comfortable reasoning style of informal proofs thanks
to 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 the expressiveness of our logics 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) TT-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
PSPACE Bounds for Rank-1 Modal Logics
For lack of general algorithmic methods that apply to wide classes of logics,
establishing a complexity bound for a given modal logic is often a laborious
task. The present work is a step towards a general theory of the complexity of
modal logics. Our main result is that all rank-1 logics enjoy a shallow model
property and thus are, under mild assumptions on the format of their
axiomatisation, in PSPACE. This leads to a unified derivation of tight
PSPACE-bounds for a number of logics including K, KD, coalition logic, graded
modal logic, majority logic, and probabilistic modal logic. Our generic
algorithm moreover finds tableau proofs that witness pleasant proof-theoretic
properties including a weak subformula property. This generality is made
possible by a coalgebraic semantics, which conveniently abstracts from the
details of a given model class and thus allows covering a broad range of logics
in a uniform way
Quantum theory as a relevant framework for the statement of probabilistic and many-valued logic
Based on ideas of quantum theory of open systems we propose the consistent
approach to the formulation of logic of plausible propositions. To this end we
associate with every plausible proposition diagonal matrix of its likelihood
and examine it as density matrix of relevant quantum system. We are showing
that all logical connectives between plausible propositions can be represented
as special positive valued transformations of these matrices. We demonstrate
also the above transformations can be realized in relevant composite quantum
systems by quantum engineering methods. The approach proposed allows one not
only to reproduce and generalize results of well-known logical systems
(Boolean, Lukasiewicz and so on) but also to classify and analyze from unified
point of view various actual problems in psychophysics and social sciences.Comment: 7 page
Probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus with independent product
The probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus is a fixed-point logic designed for
expressing properties of probabilistic labeled transition systems (PLTS's). Two
equivalent semantics have been studied for this logic, both assigning to each
state a value in the interval [0,1] representing the probability that the
property expressed by the formula holds at the state. One semantics is
denotational and the other is a game semantics, specified in terms of
two-player stochastic parity games. A shortcoming of the probabilistic modal
{\mu}-calculus is the lack of expressiveness required to encode other important
temporal logics for PLTS's such as Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL).
To address this limitation we extend the logic with a new pair of operators:
independent product and coproduct. The resulting logic, called probabilistic
modal {\mu}-calculus with independent product, can encode many properties of
interest and subsumes the qualitative fragment of PCTL. The main contribution
of this paper is the definition of an appropriate game semantics for this
extended probabilistic {\mu}-calculus. This relies on the definition of a new
class of games which generalize standard two-player stochastic (parity) games
by allowing a play to be split into concurrent subplays, each continuing their
evolution independently. Our main technical result is the equivalence of the
two semantics. The proof is carried out in ZFC set theory extended with
Martin's Axiom at an uncountable cardinal
Completeness of Flat Coalgebraic Fixpoint Logics
Modal fixpoint logics traditionally play a central role in computer science,
in particular in artificial intelligence and concurrency. The mu-calculus and
its relatives are among the most expressive logics of this type. However,
popular fixpoint logics tend to trade expressivity for simplicity and
readability, and in fact often live within the single variable fragment of the
mu-calculus. The family of such flat fixpoint logics includes, e.g., LTL, CTL,
and the logic of common knowledge. Extending this notion to the generic
semantic framework of coalgebraic logic enables covering a wide range of logics
beyond the standard mu-calculus including, e.g., flat fragments of the graded
mu-calculus and the alternating-time mu-calculus (such as alternating-time
temporal logic ATL), as well as probabilistic and monotone fixpoint logics. We
give a generic proof of completeness of the Kozen-Park axiomatization for such
flat coalgebraic fixpoint logics.Comment: Short version appeared in Proc. 21st International Conference on
Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2010, Vol. 6269 of Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, Springer, 2010, pp. 524-53
A modular approach to defining and characterising notions of simulation
We propose a modular approach to defining notions of simulation, and modal logics which characterise them. We use coalgebras to model state-based systems, relators to define notions of simulation for such systems, and inductive techniques to define the syntax and semantics of modal logics for coalgebras. We show that the expressiveness of an inductively defined logic for coalgebras w.r.t. a notion of simulation follows from an expressivity condition involving one step in the definition of the logic, and the relator inducing that notion of simulation. Moreover, we show that notions of simulation and associated characterising logics for increasingly complex system types can be derived by lifting the operations used to combine system types, to a relational level as well as to a logical level. We use these results to obtain Baltag’s logic for coalgebraic simulation, as well as notions of simulation and associated logics for a large class of non-deterministic and probabilistic systems
- …