Bart Jacobs

Bart Jacobs, Dario Stein

A basic experiment in probability theory is drawing without replacement from an urn filled with multiple balls of different colours. Clearly, it is physically impossible to overdraw, that is, to draw more balls from the urn than it contains. This paper demonstrates that overdrawing does make sense mathematically, once we allow signed distributions with negative probabilities. A new (conservative) extension of the familiar hypergeometric ('draw-and-delete') distribution is introduced that allows draws of arbitrary sizes, including overdraws. The underlying theory makes use of the dual basis functions of the Bernstein polynomials, which play a prominent role in computer graphics. Negative probabilities are treated systematically in the framework of categorical probability and the central role of datastructures such as multisets and monads is emphasised.

Bart Jacobs, David Sprunger

This article studies (multilayer perceptron) neural networks with an emphasis on the transformations involved --- both forward and backward --- in order to develop a semantical/logical perspective that is in line with standard program semantics. The common two-pass neural network training algorithms make this viewpoint particularly fitting. In the forward direction, neural networks act as state transformers. In the reverse direction, however, neural networks change losses of outputs to losses of inputs, thereby acting like a (real-valued) predicate transformer. In this way, backpropagation is functorial by construction, as shown earlier in recent other work. We illustrate this perspective by training a simple instance of a neural network.