A Semantic Account of Metric Preservation

Citation:

Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Marco Gaboardi, Justin Hsu, Shin-ya Katsumata, and Ikram Cherigui. 2017. “A Semantic Account of Metric Preservation.” Symposium on the Principle of Programming Languages, ACM. arXiv Page
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Abstract:

Program sensitivity measures how robust a program is to small changes in its input, and is a fundamental notion in domains ranging from differential privacy to cyber-physical systems. A natural way to formalize program sensitivity is in terms of metrics on the input and output spaces, requiring that an r-sensitive function map inputs that are at distance d to outputs that are at distance at most r⋅d. Program sensitivity is thus an analogue of Lipschitz continuity for programs. Reed and Pierce introduced Fuzz, a functional language with a linear type system that can express program sensitivity. They show soundness operationally, in the form of a metric preservation property. Inspired by their work, we study program sensitivity and metric preservation from a denotational point of view. In particular, we introduce metric CPOs, a novel semantic structure for reasoning about computation on metric spaces, by endowing CPOs with a compatible notion of distance. This structure is useful for reasoning about metric properties of programs, and specifically about program sensitivity. We demonstrate metric CPOs by giving a model for the deterministic fragment of Fuzz.
Last updated on 08/02/2019