Event Title: Sound Interval-Based Synthesis of Probabilistic Programs

Speaker: Guilherme Espada

Dates: Thursday, 27^th November 2025

Time: 11am (GMT)

Location: Edinburgh Bayes Coffee House (4^th floor Bayes Center, EH8 9BT)

Join Online:  https://app.huawei.com/wmeeting/join/96296184/ihsFKR3egE2YzZOkWHrI7TIfWGtAe2bCN

Meeting ID：96296184

Passcode：100424

Abstract:

Probabilistic programming has become a standard practice to model the stochasticity inherent in modeling the real world, and to analyse behavior of nature in different scientific disciplines. However, domain practitioners also need to be experts in statistics in order to select which probabilistic model is suitable for a given particular problem. Additionally, automatically selecting the model is challenging due to the large search space, mostly occupied by invalid programs that may only be detected in a subset of executions.
We propose a bounds-based type system to statically identify invalid probabilistic programs and a type-directed synthesis algorithm that guarantees correctness by construction. The resulting system allows for fast sampling of programs and enables application of techniques that previously suffered from the complexity of synthesis, such as Genetic Programming.

Bio:Guilherme Espada earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Lisbon (Faculdade de Ciências) in 2020. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at LASIGE, University of Lisbon, where he authored research on grammar-guided genetic programming, symbolic regression, and type systems.

【Edinburgh Bayes Coffee House Tech Talk】Sound Interval-Based Synthesis of Probabilistic Programs / Huawei-Edinburgh Joint Lab by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0