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Nominal Semantics for First-class Automatic Differentiation

Talkat LAFI 2026 · on Sunday, 2026-01-11· [machine-learning]
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Formalizes the popular tagged forward-mode AD (used in JAX, Julia, early PyTorch) as a meaning-preserving compiler from a simply typed lambda calculus with first-class differentiation to a target language with runtime name generation, models names in a nominal/Shulman-style topos, and proves correctness by logical relations: compiled programs return the same real values and those results are independent of generated tags, eliminating perturbation confusion for R→R programs.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Introduction
  2. 0:42First-class automatic differentiation
  3. 2:07Dual numbers and perturbation
  4. 5:18Tagged forward mode algorithm
  5. 6:43Correctness of the algorithm
  6. 11:45Correctness theorem and proof
  7. 12:26Summary and Q&A
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