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Record W4412989204 · doi:10.1145/3747534

Compiling with Generating Functions

2025· article· en· W4412989204 on OpenAlex

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
TopicBayesian Modeling and Causal Inference
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceProgramming language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We present a new approach to scaling exact inference for probabilistic programs, using generating functions (GFs) as a compilation target. Existing methods that target representations like binary decision diagrams (BDDs) achieve strong state-of-the-art results. We show that a compiler targeting GFs can be similarly competitive—and, in some cases, more scalable—on a range of inference problems where BDD-based methods perform well. We present a formal model of this compiler, providing the first definition of GF compilation for a functional probabilistic language. We prove that this compiler is correct with respect to a denotational semantics. Our approach is implemented in a probabilistic programming system called Geni and evaluated on a range of inference problems. Our results establish GF compilation as a principled and powerful paradigm for exact inference: it offers strong scalability, good expressiveness, and a solid theoretical foundation.

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.663
Threshold uncertainty score0.323

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
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 science0.0020.001
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 spread0.250 · 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