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Record W4411267694 · doi:10.1145/3729321

Handling the Selection Monad

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

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

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 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>λC</mml:mi> </mml:math> , 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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.446
Threshold uncertainty score0.581

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0030.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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