Dyna: toward a self-optimizing declarative language for machine learning applications

Declarative programming is a paradigm that allows programmers to specify what they want to compute, leaving how to compute it to a solver. Our declarative programming language, Dyna, is designed to compactly specify computations like those that are frequently encountered in machine learning. As a declarative language, Dyna’s solver has a large space of (correct) strategies available to it. We describe a reinforcement learning framework for adaptively choosing among these strategies to maximize efficiency for a given workload. Adaptivity in execution is especially important for software that will run under a variety of workloads, where no fixed policy works well. We hope that reinforcement learning will identify good policies reasonably quickly—offloading the burden of writing efficient code from human programmers.