Section: New Results

Proving Expected Sensitivity of Probabilistic Programs

Participants : Benjamin Grégoire, Gilles Barthe [IMDEA] , Thomas Espitau [UPMC Paris 6] , Justin Hsu [University of Pennsylvania] , Pierre-Yves Strub [Ecole Polytechnique] .

Program sensitivity, also known as Lipschitz continuity, describes how small changes in a program's input lead to bounded changes in the output. We propose an average notion of program sensitivity for probabilistic programs—expected sensitivity—that averages a distance function over a probabilistic coupling of two output distributions from two similar inputs. This work is described in [8].