Papers › CHAD for Expressive Total Languages

CHAD for Expressive Total Languages

1 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.00446links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Fernando Lucatelli Nunes, Matthijs Vákár

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We show how to apply forward and reverse mode Combinatory Homomorphic Automatic Differentiation (CHAD) to total functional programming languages with expressive type systems featuring the combination of - tuple types; - sum types; - inductive types; - coinductive types; - function types. We achieve this by analysing the categorical semantics of such types in Σ-types (Grothendieck constructions) of suitable categories. Using a novel categorical logical relations technique for such expressive type systems, we give a correctness proof of CHAD in this setting by showing that it computes the usual mathematical derivative of the function that the original program implements. The result is a principled, purely functional and provably correct method for performing forward and reverse mode automatic differentiation (AD) on total functional programming languages with expressive type systems.

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