POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Fri 16 Jan 2026 14:00 - 14:25 at Nef - Probabilistic Programming Chair(s): Michele Pagani

Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are a popular tool for high-level modelling across many fields. They provide a range of algorithms for probabilistic inference, which analyse models by learning their parameters from a dataset or estimating their posterior distributions. However, probabilistic inference is known to be very costly. One of the bottlenecks of probabilistic inference stems from the iteration over entries of a large dataset or a long series of random samples. Vectorisation can mitigate this cost, but manual vectorisation is error-prone, and existing automatic techniques are often ad-hoc and limited, unable to handle general repetition structures, such as nested loops and loops with data-dependent control flow, without significant user intervention. To address this bottleneck, we propose a sound and effective method for automatically vectorising loops in probabilistic programs. Our method achieves high throughput using speculative parallel execution of loop iterations, while preserving the semantics of the original loop through a fixed-point check. We formalise our method as a translation from an imperative PPL into a lower-level target language with primitives geared towards vectorisation. We implemented our method for the Pyro PPL and evaluated it on a range of probabilistic models. Our experiments show significant performance gains against an existing vectorisation baseline, achieving $1.1$–$6\times$ speedups and reducing GPU memory usage in many cases. Unlike the baseline, which is limited to a subset of models, our method effectively handled all the tested models.

Fri 16 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

14:00 - 15:40
Probabilistic ProgrammingPOPL at Nef
Chair(s): Michele Pagani ENS Lyon
14:00
25m
Talk
Optimising Density Computations in Probabilistic Programs via Automatic Loop Vectorisation
POPL
Sangho Lim KAIST, Hyoungjin Lim KAIST, Wonyeol Lee POSTECH, Xavier Rival Inria - CNRS - Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris - PSL University, Hongseok Yang KAIST
DOI
14:25
25m
Talk
Probabilistic Concurrent Reasoning in Outcome Logic: Independence, Conditioning, and InvariantsDistinguished Paper
POPL
Noam Zilberstein Cornell University, Alexandra Silva Cornell University, Joseph Tassarotti New York University
DOI
14:50
25m
Talk
Probabilistic Programming with Vectorized Programmable InferenceRemote
POPL
McCoy Reynolds Becker MIT, Mathieu Huot MIT, George Matheos Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Xiaoyan Wang Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Karen Chung Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Colin Smith Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sam Ritchie Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rif A. Saurous Google, Alexander K. Lew Yale University, Martin C. Rinard Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vikash K. Mansinghka Massachusetts Institute of Technology
DOI
15:15
25m
Talk
Tropical Mathematics and the Lambda-Calculus II: Tropical Geometry of Probabilistic Programming Languages
POPL
Davide Barbarossa University of Bath, Paolo Pistone Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
DOI