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arXiv · 1705.09970

Probabilistic Program Abstractions

Steven Holtzen·Todd Millstein·Guy Van den Broeck
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Abstract

Abstraction is a fundamental tool for reasoning about complex systems. Program abstraction has been utilized to great effect for analyzing deterministic programs. At the heart of program abstraction is the relationship between a concrete program, which is difficult to analyze, and an abstract program, which is more tractable. Program abstractions, however, are typically not probabilistic. We generalize non-deterministic program abstractions to probabilistic program abstractions by explicitly quantifying the non-deterministic choices. Our framework upgrades key definitions and properties of abstractions to the probabilistic context. We also discuss preliminary ideas for performing inference on probabilistic abstractions and general probabilistic programs.

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Steven Holtzen, Todd Millstein, Guy Van den Broeck. 2017-05-28. Probabilistic Program Abstractions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09970

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