Putting Operational Techniques to the Test: A Syntactic Theory for Behavioral Verilog

AbstractWe present a syntactic theory for the behavioral subset of the Verilog Hardware Description Language. Due to the complexity of the language, the construction of this theory represents a serious test of the suitability of syntactic operational techniques for reasoning about industrial languages. Overall, we have found that these techniques are rather robust but with a few caveats. Our theory formalizes the simulation cycle explicitly, exposes a number of ambiguities and inconsistencies in the language reference manual (LRM), and is the most accurate known description of this subset of Verilog, with respect to the LRM. The syntactic theory has been used to automatically derive a simulator for Verilog

On the Reduction of Variance and Overestimation of Deep Q-Learning

The breakthrough of deep Q-Learning on different types of environments revolutionized the algorithmic design of Reinforcement Learning to introduce more stable and robust algorithms, to that end many extensions to deep Q-Learning algorithm have been proposed to reduce the variance of the target values and the overestimation phenomena. In this paper, we examine new methodology to solve these issues, we propose using Dropout techniques on deep Q-Learning algorithm as a way to reduce variance and overestimation. We further present experiments on some of the benchmark environments that demonstrate significant improvement of the stability of the performance and a reduction in variance and overestimation

A Type-Theoretic Foundation of Delimited Continuations

International audienceThere is a correspondence between classical logic and programming language calculi with first-class continuations. With the addition of control delimiters, the continuations become composable and the calculi become more expressive. We present a fine-grained analysis of control delimiters and formalise that their addition corresponds to the addition of a single dynamically-scoped variable modelling the special top-level continuation. From a type perspective, the dynamically-scoped variable requires effect annotations. In the presence of control, the dynamically-scoped variable can be interpreted in a purely functional way by applying a store-passing style. At the type level, the effect annotations are mapped within standard classical logic extended with the dual of implication, namely subtraction. A continuation-passing-style transformation of lambda-calculus with control and subtraction is defined. Combining the translations provides a decomposition of standard CPS transformations for delimited continuations. Incidentally, we also give a direct normalisation proof of the simply-typed lambda-calculus with control and subtraction