Semantics for Reactive Probabilistic Programming

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• Christine Tasson (Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace)
• Friday 28 November 2025, 14:00-15:00
• SS03, Computer Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ioannis Markakis.

Synchronous languages are now a standard industrial tool for critical embedded systems. Designers write high-level specifications by composing streams of values using block diagrams. These languages have been extended with Bayesian reasoning to program state-space models which compute a stream of distributions given a stream of observations [1].

This talk aims at describing semantics for probabilistic synchronous languages, based on a joint work with Guillaume Baudart and Louis Mandel [2]. The key idea is to interpret probabilistic expressions as a stream of non-normalized density functions which maps random variable values to a result and a positive score. Two equivalent semantics are presented: the co-iterative semantics is executable while the relational semantics is easy to use for proving program equivalence. The semantical framework is applied to prove the correctness of a program transformation required to run an optimized inference algorithm.

[1] Reactive Probabilistic Programming, Guillaume Baudart et al, PLDI 2020 [2] Scheduled agnostic Semantics for Reactive Probabilistic Programming, Guillaume Baudart, Louis Mandel, Christine Tasson, ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning 2025

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

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