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Record W4411267694 · doi:10.1145/3729321

Handling the Selection Monad

2025· article· en· W4411267694 on OpenAlexaff
Gordon Plotkin, Ningning Xie

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, programming, and type systems
Canadian institutionsGoogle (Canada)University of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMonad (category theory)Selection (genetic algorithm)Computer scienceProgramming languageMathematicsArtificial intelligenceDiscrete mathematicsFunctor

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The selection monad on a set consists of selection functions. These select an element from the set, based on a loss (dually, reward) function giving the loss resulting from a choice of an element. Abadi and Plotkin used the monad to model a language with operations making choices of computations taking account of the loss that would arise from each choice. However, their choices were optimal, and they asked if they could instead be programmer provided. In this work, we present a novel design enabling programmers to do so. We present a version of algebraic effect handlers enriched by computational ideas inspired by the selection monad. Specifically, as well as the usual delimited continuations, our new kind of handlers additionally have access to choice continuations , that give the possible future losses. In this way programmers can write operations implementing optimisation algorithms that are aware of the losses arising from their possible choices. We give an operational semantics for a higher-order model language λC , and establish desirable properties including progress, type soundness, and termination for a subset with a mild hierarchical constraint on allowable operation types. We give this subset a selection monad denotational semantics, and prove soundness and adequacy results. We also present a Haskell implementation and give a variety of programming examples.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.035

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.003
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.005
Scholarly communication0.0050.012
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.264
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueProceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesSame topicLogic, programming, and type systemsFrench-language works237,207