Data-Driven Invariant Learning for Probabilistic Programs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bao, Jialu, Trivedi, Nitesh, Pathak, Drashti, Hsu, Justin, Roy, Subhajit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Bao, Jialu
Trivedi, Nitesh
Pathak, Drashti
Hsu, Justin
Roy, Subhajit
author_facet Bao, Jialu
Trivedi, Nitesh
Pathak, Drashti
Hsu, Justin
Roy, Subhajit
contents Morgan and McIver's weakest pre-expectation framework is one of the most well-established methods for deductive verification of probabilistic programs. Roughly, the idea is to generalize binary state assertions to real-valued expectations, which can measure expected values of probabilistic program quantities. While loop-free programs can be analyzed by mechanically transforming expectations, verifying loops usually requires finding an invariant expectation, a difficult task. We propose a new view of invariant expectation synthesis as a regression problem: given an input state, predict the average value of the post-expectation in the output distribution. Guided by this perspective, we develop the first data-driven invariant synthesis method for probabilistic programs. Unlike prior work on probabilistic invariant inference, our approach can learn piecewise continuous invariants without relying on template expectations, and also works with black-box access to the program. We also develop a data-driven approach to learn sub-invariants from data, which can be used to upper- or lower-bound expected values. We implement our approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness on a variety of benchmarks from the probabilistic programming literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2106_05421
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-Driven Invariant Learning for Probabilistic Programs
Bao, Jialu
Trivedi, Nitesh
Pathak, Drashti
Hsu, Justin
Roy, Subhajit
Programming Languages
Morgan and McIver's weakest pre-expectation framework is one of the most well-established methods for deductive verification of probabilistic programs. Roughly, the idea is to generalize binary state assertions to real-valued expectations, which can measure expected values of probabilistic program quantities. While loop-free programs can be analyzed by mechanically transforming expectations, verifying loops usually requires finding an invariant expectation, a difficult task. We propose a new view of invariant expectation synthesis as a regression problem: given an input state, predict the average value of the post-expectation in the output distribution. Guided by this perspective, we develop the first data-driven invariant synthesis method for probabilistic programs. Unlike prior work on probabilistic invariant inference, our approach can learn piecewise continuous invariants without relying on template expectations, and also works with black-box access to the program. We also develop a data-driven approach to learn sub-invariants from data, which can be used to upper- or lower-bound expected values. We implement our approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness on a variety of benchmarks from the probabilistic programming literature.
title Data-Driven Invariant Learning for Probabilistic Programs
topic Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05421