A category of HO/N-style games and probabilistic strategies is developedwhere the possible choices of a strategy are quantified so as to give a measure of the likelihood of seeing a given play. A 2-sided die is shown to be universal in this category, in the sense that any strategy breaks down into a composition between some deterministic strategy and that die. The interpretative power of the category is then demonstrated by delineating a Cartesian closed subcategory which provides a fully abstract model of a probabilistic extension of Idealized Algol.

As probabilistic computations play an increasing role in solving various problems, researchers have designed probabilistic languages which treat probability distributions as primitive datatypes. Most probabilistic languages, however, focus only on discrete distributions and have limited expressive power. This paper presents a probabilistic language, called λ○, whose expressive power is beyond discrete distributions. Rich expressiveness of λ ○ is due to its use of sampling functions, i.e., mappings from the unit interval (0.0, 1.0] to probability domains, in specifying probability distributions. As such, λ ○ enables programmers to formally express and reason about sampling methods developed in simulation theory. The use of λ ○ is demonstrated with three applications in robotics: robot localization, people tracking, and robotic mapping. All experiments have been carried out with real robots.

Motivated by many practical applications that have to compute in the presence of uncertainty, we propose a monadic probabilistic language based upon the mathematical notion of sampling function. Our language provides a unified representation scheme for probability distributions, enjoys rich expressiveness, and o#ers high versatility in encoding probability distributions. We also develop a novel style of operational semantics called a horizontal operational semantics, under which an evaluation returns not a single outcome but multiple outcomes. We have preliminary evidence that the horizontal operational semantics improves the ordinary operational semantics with respect to both execution time and accuracy in representing probability distributions.

Markov processes with continuous state spaces arise in the analysis of stochastic physical systems or stochastic hybrid systems. The standard logical and algorithmic tools for reasoning about discrete (finite-state) systems are, of course, inadequate for reasoning about such systems. In this work we develop three related ideas for making such reasoning principles applicable to continuous systems. ffl We show how to approximate continuous systems by a countable family of finite-state probabilistic systems, we can reconstruct the full system from these finite approximants, ffl we define a metric between processes and show that the approximants converge in this metric to the full process, ffl we show that reasoning about properties definable in a rich logic can be carried out in terms of the approximants. The systems that we consider are Markov processes where the state space is continuous but the time steps are discrete. We allow such processes to interact with the environment by syn...

As probabilistic computations play an increasing role in solving various problems, researchers have designed probabilistic languages which treat probability distributions as primitive datatypes. Most probabilistic languages, however, focus only on discrete distributions and have limited expressive power. This article presents a probabilistic language, called λ○, whose expressive power is beyond discrete distributions. Rich expressiveness of λ ○ is due to its use of sampling functions, that is, mappings from the unit interval (0.0, 1.0] to probability domains, in specifying probability distributions. As such, λ ○ enables programmers to formally express and reason about sampling methods developed in simulation theory. The use of λ ○ is demonstrated with three applications in robotics: robot localization, people tracking, and robotic mapping. All experiments have been carried out with real robots.

As probabilistic computations play an increasing role in solving various problems, researchers have designed probabilistic languages to facilitate their modeling. Most of the existing probabilistic languages, however, focus only on discrete distributions, and there has been little effort to develop probabilistic languages whose expressive power is beyond discrete distributions. This dissertation presents a probabilistic language, called PTP (ProbabilisTic Programming), which supports all kinds of probability distributions.

Abstract. The Bayesian approach to machine learning amounts to inferring posterior distributions of random variables from a probabilistic model of how the variables are related (that is, a prior distribution) and a set of observations of variables. There is a trend in machine learning towards expressing Bayesian models as probabilistic programs. As a foundation for this kind of programming, we propose a core functional calculus with primitives for sampling prior distributions and observing variables. We define combinators for measure transformers, based on theorems in measure theory, and use these to give a rigorous semantics to our core calculus. The original features of our semantics include its support for discrete, continuous, and hybrid measures, and, in particular, for observations of zero-probability events. We compile our core language to a small imperative language that has a straightforward semantics via factor graphs, data structures that enable many efficient inference algorithms. We use an existing inference engine for efficient approximate inference of posterior marginal distributions, treating thousands of observations per second for large instances of realistic models. 1