Jürgen Cito (PI)
Associate ProfessorEmail: juergen.cito@tuwien.ac.at
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Probabilistic programming provides an intuitive means to specify Bayesian models as programs and to automatically perform posterior inference with general-purpose algorithms.
This makes probabilistic modelling more accessible to non-experts in Bayesian statictics, however, it comes with new challenges.
Through the lens of software engineering, we explore new approaches to improve the probabilistic programming experience.
Describes a framework which allows the formulation of program analyses which target problems specific to the probabilistic programming environment in a high-level API. The analyses can be applied to any probabilistic programming language for which light-weight bindings are implemented.
Probabilistic programming allows developers to focus on the modeling aspect in the Bayesian workflow by abstracting away the posterior inference machinery. In practice, however, programming errors specific to the probabilistic environment are hard to fix without deep knowledge of the underlying systems. Like in classical software engineering, static program analysis methods could be employed to catch many of these errors. In this work, we present the first framework to formulate static analyses for probabilistic programs in a language-agnostic manner: LASAPP. While prior work focused on specific languages, all analyses written with our framework can be readily applied to new languages by adding easy-to-implement API bindings. Our prototype supports five popular probabilistic programming languages out-of-the-box. We demonstrate the effectiveness and expressiveness of the LASAPP framework by presenting four provably-correct language-agnostic probabilistic program analyses that address problems discussed in the literature and evaluate them on over 200 real-world programs.
@inproceedings{boeck2024language-agnostic,
title={Language-Agnostic Static Analysis of Probabilistic Programs},
author={B{\"o}ck, Markus and Schr{\"o}der, Michael and Cito, J{\"u}rgen},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering},
pages={78--90},
year={2024}
}