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Title: Predicted Variables in Programming

Paper content:
We present Predicted Variables, an approach to making machine learning (ML) a first class citizen in programming languages.
There is a growing divide in approaches to building systems: using human experts (e.g. programming) on the one hand, and using behavior learned from data (e.g. ML) on the other hand.
PVars aim to make using ML in programming easier by hybridizing the two.
We leverage the existing concept of variables and create a new type, a predicted variable.
PVars are akin to native variables with one important distinction: PVars determine their value using ML when evaluated.
We describe PVars and their interface, how they can be used in programming, and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three algorithmic problems: binary search, QuickSort, and caches.
We show experimentally that PVars are able to improve over the commonly used heuristics and lead to a better performance than the original algorithms.
As opposed to previous work applying ML to algorithmic problems, PVars have the advantage that they can be used within the existing frameworks and do not require the existing domain knowledge to be replaced.
PVars allow for a seamless integration of ML into existing systems and algorithms.
Our PVars implementation currently relies on standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods.
To learn faster, PVars use the heuristic function, which they are replacing, as an initial function.
We show that PVars quickly pick up the behavior of the initial function and then improve performance beyond that without ever performing substantially worse -- allowing for a safe deployment in critical applications.
Machine Learning (ML) has had many successes in the past decade in terms of techniques and systems as well as in the number of areas in which it is successfully applied.
However, using ML has some cost that comes from the additional complexity added to software systems BID24 .
There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between the approaches to system building.
Software systems have evolved from the idea that experts have full control over the behavior of the system and specify the exact steps to be followed.
ML on the other hand has evolved from learning behavior by observing data.
It allows for learning more complex but implicit programs leading to a loss of control for programmers since the behavior is now controlled by data.
We believe it is very difficult to move from one to another of these approaches but that a hybrid between them needs to exist which allows to leverage both the developer's domain-specific knowledge and the adaptability of ML systems.We present Predicted Variables (PVars) as an approach to hybridize ML with programming.
We leverage the existing concept of a variable which is universal across all programming modalities and add a new type, a predicted variable.
PVars are akin to native variables with one important distinction: a PVar determines its value using ML when evaluated.
A developer will be able to use a PVar just like any other variable, combine it with heuristics, domain specific knowledge, problem constraints, etc. in ways that are fully under the programmer's control.
This represents an inversion of control compared to how ML systems are usually built.
PVars allow to integrate ML tightly into algorithms whereas traditional ML systems are build around the model.
PVars aim to make using ML in software development easier by avoiding the overhead of going through the traditional steps of building an ML system: (1) collecting and preparing training data, (2) defining a training loss, (3) training an initial model, (4) tweaking and optimizing the model, (5) integrating the model into their system, and (6) continuously updating and improving the model to adjust for drift in the distribution of the data processed.We show how these properties of PVars allow for applying ML in domains that have traditionally not been using ML.
We demonstrate that ML can help improve the performance of "classical" algorithms that typically rely on a heuristic.
The concrete implementation of PVars in this paper is based on standard deep reinforcement learning (RL).
We emphasize that this is just one possible implementation.
Other types of machine learning are in scope for PVars: supervised learning can be used when ground truth is available, or active learning is applicable when humans are in the loop to provide feedback.While in this paper we show PVars in the context of the Python programming language and use concepts from object oriented programming, everything described here applies directly to functional or procedural programming languages as well.
We describe the framework around the central concept of a predicted variable but depending on the language the notion of a predicted function can be used interchangeably.We also introduce the notion of an initial function which can be the current heuristic that a PVar is replacing.
It allows the PVar to minimize regret in critical applications and allow for safe deployment.
This is a key strengths of our hybrid approach: it allows for better solutions while also providing better guarantees to the programmer.We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three algorithmic problems: binary search, QuickSort, and caches where we replace and enrich commonly used heuristics.
We show improvements over common heuristics by injecting a predicted variable into an existing program, leaving much of the algorithm (including the domain-specific knowledge) untouched.
We consider these problems the first applications of our newly defined interface and see the main contribution of this paper in the general applicability of the framework.
The problem selection in this paper was driven by the desire for a self-contained setup and ease of reproducibility.
PVars are applicable to more general problems across a large variety of domains from system optimization to user modelling.In our experiments we do not focus on the actual run time but rather on the effectiveness of the ML models.
While for the algorithmic examples in this paper, in a practical scenario speed is the key metric, we see PVars as a more general interface that can be applied across a more diverse set of problems including user modelling, predicting user preference, or content recommendations.
In many applications, speed is not a meaningful metric.
Further, we believe that advances in specialized hardware will enable running machine learning models at insignificant cost (Kraska et al., 2018) .Our
main contributions are:• we introduce the PVar API to smoothly integrate ML into software development;• we show how standard RL methods can be leveraged through the PVars interface;• we propose an approach to learn using the initial function, leveraging off-policy learning;• we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on 3 standard algorithmic problems.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: We describe how PVars can be used in software development in sec. 2 and how we make use of the heuristics that we are replacing to guide the training and avoid unstable behavior in sec. 3. Sec.
4 describes our implementation and the application of PVars to three algorithmic applications. We also
describe the experiments that we performed to demonstrate that PVars are an intuitive approach to bring ML closer to software development and are applicable to different problems. We describe
related work in sec. 5.
We have introduced a new programming concept called a predicted variable (PVar) aiming to make it easier for developers to use machine learning from their existing code.
Contrary to other approaches, PVars can easily be integrated and hand full control to the developer over how ML models are used and trained.
PVars bridge the chasm between the traditional approaches of software systems building and machine learning modeling and thus allow for the developer to focus on refining their algorithm and metrics rather than working on building pipelines to incorporate machine learning.
PVars achieve this by reusing the existing concept of variables in programming in a novel way where the value of the variable is determined using machine learning.
PVar observes information about its context and receives feedback about the quality of predictions instead of being assigned a value directly.We have studied the feasibility of PVars in three algorithmic problems.
For each we show how easy PVars can be incorporated, how performance improves in comparison to not using a PVar at all.
Specifically, through our experiments we highlight both advantages and disadvantages that reinforcement learning brings when used as a solution for a generic interface as PVars.Note that we do not claim to have the best possible machine learning model for each of these problems but our contribution lies in building a framework that allows for using ML easily, spreading its use, and improving the performance in places where machine learning would not have been used otherwise.
PVars are applicable to more general problems across a large variety of domains from system optimization to user modelling.
Our current implementation of PVars is built on standard RL methods but other ML methods such as supervised learning are in scope as well if the problem is appropriate.

assistant: text: We present Predicted Variables, an approach to making machine learning a first class citizen in programming languages.