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Record W4411267730 · doi:10.1145/3729338

Practical Type Inference with Levels

2025· article· en· W4411267730 on OpenAlexaff
Andong Fan, Han Xu, Ningning Xie

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, programming, and type systems
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInferenceType (biology)Type inferenceComputer scienceMathematicsArtificial intelligenceGeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Modern functional languages rely on sophisticated type inference algorithms. However, there often exists a gap between the theoretical presentation of these algorithms and their practical implementations. Specifically, implementations employ techniques not explicitly included in formal specifications, causing undesirable consequences. First, this leads to confusion and unforeseen challenges for developers adhering to the formal specification. Moreover, theoretical guarantees established for a formal presentation may not directly translate to the implementation. This paper focuses on formalizing one such technique, known as levels , which is widely used in practice but whose theoretical treatment remains largely understudied. We present the first comprehensive formalization of levels and demonstrate their applicability to type inference implementations.

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)0.016
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.047
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 score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.087

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0160.047
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.004
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0020.008
Scholarly communication0.0100.019
Open science0.0050.010
Research integrity0.0030.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0110.006

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 head0.039
GPT teacher head0.327
Teacher spread0.288 · 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

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

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