Probabilistic Termination by Monadic Affine Sized Typing

International audienceWe introduce a system of monadic affine sized types, which substantially generalise usual sized types, and allows this way to capture probabilistic higher-order programs which terminate almost surely. Going beyond plain, strong normalisation without losing soundness turns out to be a hard task, which cannot be accomplished without a richer, quantitative notion of types, but also without imposing some affinity constraints. The proposed type system is powerful enough to type classic examples of probabilistically terminating programs such as random walks. The way typable programs are proved to be almost surely terminating is based on reducibility, but requires a substantial adaptation of the technique

Intersection types and (positive) almost-sure termination

Randomized higher-order computation can be seen as being captured by a λ-calculus endowed with a single algebraic operation, namely a construct for binary probabilistic choice. What matters about such computations is the probability of obtaining any given result, rather than the possibility or the necessity of obtaining it, like in (non)deterministic computation. Termination, arguably the simplest kind of reachability problem, can be spelled out in at least two ways, depending on whether it talks about the probability of convergence or about the expected evaluation time, the second one providing a stronger guarantee. In this paper, we show that intersection types are capable of precisely characterizing both notions of termination inside a single system of types: the probability of convergence of any λ-term can be underapproximated by its type, while the underlying derivation's weight gives a lower bound to the term's expected number of steps to normal form. Noticeably, both approximations are tight-not only soundness but also completeness holds. The crucial ingredient is non-idempotency, without which it would be impossible to reason on the expected number of reduction steps which are necessary to completely evaluate any term. Besides, the kind of approximation we obtain is proved to be optimal recursion theoretically: no recursively enumerable formal system can do better than that

Intersection Types and (Positive) Almost-Sure Termination

Randomized higher-order computation can be seen as being captured by a lambda calculus endowed with a single algebraic operation, namely a construct for binary probabilistic choice. What matters about such computations is the probability of obtaining any given result, rather than the possibility or the necessity of obtaining it, like in (non)deterministic computation. Termination, arguably the simplest kind of reachability problem, can be spelled out in at least two ways, depending on whether it talks about the probability of convergence or about the expected evaluation time, the second one providing a stronger guarantee. In this paper, we show that intersection types are capable of precisely characterizing both notions of termination inside a single system of types: the probability of convergence of any lambda-term can be underapproximated by its type, while the underlying derivation's weight gives a lower bound to the term's expected number of steps to normal form. Noticeably, both approximations are tight -- not only soundness but also completeness holds. The crucial ingredient is non-idempotency, without which it would be impossible to reason on the expected number of reduction steps which are necessary to completely evaluate any term. Besides, the kind of approximation we obtain is proved to be optimal recursion theoretically: no recursively enumerable formal system can do better than that

Probabilistic Analysis of Binary Sessions

We study a probabilistic variant of binary session types that relate to a class of Finite-State Markov Chains. The probability annotations in session types enable the reasoning on the probability that a session terminates successfully, for some user-definable notion of successful termination. We develop a type system for a simple session calculus featuring probabilistic choices and show that the success probability of well-typed processes agrees with that of the sessions they use. To this aim, the type system needs to track the propagation of probabilistic choices across different sessions

On probabilistic term rewriting

open3siThis work is partially supported by the ANR projects 14CE250005 ELICA and 16CE250011 REPAS, the FWF project Y757, the JSPS-INRIA bilateral joint research project “CRECOGI”, the ERC Consolidator Grant DLV-818616 DIAPASoN, and JST ERATO HASUO Metamathematics for Systems Design Project (No. JPMJER1603).We study the termination problem for probabilistic term rewrite systems. We prove that the interpretation method is sound and complete for a strengthening of positive almost sure termination, when abstract reduction systems and term rewrite systems are considered. Two instances of the interpretation method—polynomial and matrix interpretations—are analyzed and shown to capture interesting and nontrivial examples when automated. We capture probabilistic computation in a novel way by means of multidistribution reduction sequences, thus accounting for both the nondeterminism in the choice of the redex and the probabilism intrinsic in firing each rule.openAvanzini M.; Dal Lago U.; Yamada A.Avanzini M.; Dal Lago U.; Yamada A

On continuation-passing transformations and expected cost analysis

We define a continuation-passing style (CPS) translation for a typed \u3bb-calculus with probabilistic choice, unbounded recursion, and a tick operator - for modeling cost. The target language is a (non-probabilistic) \u3bb-calculus, enriched with a type of extended positive reals and a fixpoint operator. We then show that applying the CPS transform of an expression M to the continuation \u3bb v. 0 yields the expected cost of M. We also introduce a formal system for higher-order logic, called EHOL, prove it sound, and show it can derive tight upper bounds on the expected cost of classic examples, including Coupon Collector and Random Walk. Moreover, we relate our translation to Kaminski et al.'s ert-calculus, showing that the latter can be recovered by applying our CPS translation to (a generalization of) the classic embedding of imperative programs into \u3bb-calculus. Finally, we prove that the CPS transform of an expression can also be used to compute pre-expectations and to reason about almost sure termination

A New Proof Rule for Almost-Sure Termination

An important question for a probabilistic program is whether the probability mass of all its diverging runs is zero, that is that it terminates "almost surely". Proving that can be hard, and this paper presents a new method for doing so; it is expressed in a program logic, and so applies directly to source code. The programs may contain both probabilistic- and demonic choice, and the probabilistic choices may depend on the current state. As do other researchers, we use variant functions (a.k.a. "super-martingales") that are real-valued and probabilistically might decrease on each loop iteration; but our key innovation is that the amount as well as the probability of the decrease are parametric. We prove the soundness of the new rule, indicate where its applicability goes beyond existing rules, and explain its connection to classical results on denumerable (non-demonic) Markov chains.Comment: V1 to appear in PoPL18. This version collects some existing text into new example subsection 5.5 and adds a new example 5.6 and makes further remarks about uncountable branching. The new example 5.6 relates to work on lexicographic termination methods, also to appear in PoPL18 [Agrawal et al, 2018

Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The 31 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers cover topics such as categorical models and logics; language theory, automata, and games; modal, spatial, and temporal logics; type theory and proof theory; concurrency theory and process calculi; rewriting theory; semantics of programming languages; program analysis, correctness, transformation, and verification; logics of programming; software specification and refinement; models of concurrent, reactive, stochastic, distributed, hybrid, and mobile systems; emerging models of computation; logical aspects of computational complexity; models of software security; and logical foundations of data bases.