We introduce the notion of a stochastic probabilistic program and present a reference implementation of a probabilistic programming facility supporting specification of stochastic probabilistic programs and inference in them. Stochastic probabilistic programs allow straightforward specification and efficient inference …
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48 results for “probabilistic programs”
Improves probabilistic programming by analyzing program structure.
problem Inefficiency and limitations of single inference algorithms in probabilistic programming.
method Three novel techniques: static and dynamic analyses to adapt programs for more efficient inference.
result Improves probabilistic programming by making inference more efficient.
We propose design guidelines for a probabilistic programming facility suitable for deployment as a part of a production software system. As a reference implementation, we introduce Infergo, a probabilistic programming facility for Go, a modern programming language of choice for server-side software development. We argu…
We present a new algorithm for approximate inference in probabilistic programs, based on a stochastic gradient for variational programs. This method is efficient without restrictions on the probabilistic program; it is particularly practical for distributions which are not analytically tractable, including highly struc…
We develop a technique for generalising from data in which models are samplers represented as program text. We establish encouraging empirical results that suggest that Markov chain Monte Carlo probabilistic programming inference techniques coupled with higher-order probabilistic programming languages are now sufficien…
Forward inference techniques such as sequential Monte Carlo and particle Markov chain Monte Carlo for probabilistic programming can be implemented in any programming language by creative use of standardized operating system functionality including processes, forking, mutexes, and shared memory. Exploiting this we have …
Probabilistic programming is a powerful abstraction for statistical machine learning. Applying static analysis methods to probabilistic programs could serve to optimize the learning process, automatically verify properties of models, and improve the programming interface for users. This field of static analysis for pro…
This work offers a broad perspective on probabilistic modeling and inference in light of recent advances in probabilistic programming, in which models are formally expressed in Turing-complete programming languages. We consider a typical workflow and how probabilistic programming languages can help to automate this wor…
This book is a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic programming. It not only provides a thorough background for anyone wishing to use a probabilistic programming system, but also introduces the techniques needed to design and build these systems. It is aimed at people who have an undergraduate-level understandi…
Probabilistic programming languages represent complex data with intermingled models in a few lines of code. Efficient inference algorithms in probabilistic programming languages make possible to build unified frameworks to compute interesting probabilities of various large, real-world problems. When the structure of mo…
SPPL simplifies probabilistic programming for exact inference.
problem Efficient exact inference in probabilistic models.
method SPPL translates probabilistic programs into sum-product expressions, leveraging new techniques for scalability.
result SPPL achieves up to 3500x speedups in exact inference.
New method for efficient probabilistic inference using masked language modeling.
problem Efficient posterior inference in probabilistic programs with many hyper-parameters.
method Formulate inference as masked language modeling, train a neural network to unmask random values.
result Foundation posterior for zero-shot inference and fine-tuning across a range of programs.
We extend probabilistic programming to handle conditioning on marginal distributions.
problem Conditioning probabilistic programs on marginal distributions of observable variables.
method We define and implement stochastic conditioning, allowing inference in probabilistic programs conditioned on marginal distributions.
result We demonstrate the effectiveness of stochastic conditioning in various real-life scenarios.
In this work, we explore how probabilistic programs can be used to represent policies in sequential decision problems. In this formulation, a probabilistic program is a black-box stochastic simulator for both the problem domain and the agent. We relate classic policy gradient techniques to recently introduced black-box…
We elaborate on using importance sampling for causal reasoning, in particular for counterfactual inference. We show how this can be implemented natively in probabilistic programming. By considering the structure of the counterfactual query, one can significantly optimise the inference process. We also consider design c…
Probabilistic inference procedures are usually coded painstakingly from scratch, for each target model and each inference algorithm. We reduce this effort by generating inference procedures from models automatically. We make this code generation modular by decomposing inference algorithms into reusable program-to-progr…
Naive approaches to amortized inference in probabilistic programs with unbounded loops can produce estimators with infinite variance. This is particularly true of importance sampling inference in programs that explicitly include rejection sampling as part of the user-programmed generative procedure. In this paper we de…
We introduce an approximate search algorithm for fast maximum a posteriori probability estimation in probabilistic programs, which we call Bayesian ascent Monte Carlo (BaMC). Probabilistic programs represent probabilistic models with varying number of mutually dependent finite, countable, and continuous random variable…
Pyro is a probabilistic programming language built on Python as a platform for developing advanced probabilistic models in AI research. To scale to large datasets and high-dimensional models, Pyro uses stochastic variational inference algorithms and probability distributions built on top of PyTorch, a modern GPU-accele…
NP-HMC extends HMC for nonparametric models in probabilistic programming.
problem Inference for nonparametric models in probabilistic programming.
method Introduces NP-HMC, a generalization of HMC for nonparametric models using tree representable functions.
result Empirically shows significant performance improvements over existing approaches.
We introduce a method for using deep neural networks to amortize the cost of inference in models from the family induced by universal probabilistic programming languages, establishing a framework that combines the strengths of probabilistic programming and deep learning methods. We call what we do "compilation of infer…
Probabilistic modeling enables combining domain knowledge with learning from data, thereby supporting learning from fewer training instances than purely data-driven methods. However, learning probabilistic models is difficult and has not achieved the level of performance of methods such as deep neural networks on many …
Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques rank among current state-of-the-art methods for probabilistic program inference. A drawback of these techniques is that they rely on importance resampling, which results in degenerate particle trajectories and a low effective sample size for variables sampled early in a prog…
dynestyx: A library for probabilistic programming of dynamical systems
problem integrating state-space models into probabilistic programming languages
method a unified interface for specifying priors and performing inference
result principled uncertainty quantification for state and parameters
This abstract extends on the previous work (arXiv:1407.2646, arXiv:1606.00075) on program induction using probabilistic programming. It describes possible further steps to extend that work, such that, ultimately, automatic probabilistic program synthesis can generalise over any reasonable set of inputs and outputs, in …
Guaranteed bounds for posterior inference in probabilistic programs.
problem Approximating the posterior distribution of probabilistic programs with provable correctness.
method Interval-based trace semantics, soundness and completeness proofs, weight-aware interval type system.
result Guaranteed bounds on the posterior distribution of probabilistic programs are computed and proven to be correct.
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is arguably the dominant statistical inference algorithm used in most popular "first-order differentiable" Probabilistic Programming Languages (PPLs). However, the fact that HMC uses derivative information causes complications when the target distribution is non-differentiable with respect…
Probabilistic programs with mixed support (both continuous and discrete latent random variables) commonly appear in many probabilistic programming systems (PPSs). However, the existence of the discrete random variables prohibits many basic gradient-based inference engines, which makes the inference procedure on such mo…
Probabilistic programming allows specification of probabilistic models in a declarative manner. Recently, several new software systems and languages for probabilistic programming have been developed on the basis of newly developed and improved methods for approximate inference in probabilistic models. In this contribut…
Probabilistic techniques are central to data analysis, but different approaches can be difficult to apply, combine, and compare. This paper introduces composable generative population models (CGPMs), a computational abstraction that extends directed graphical models and can be used to describe and compose a broad class…
Framework uses probabilistic programming for physics simulation in games.
problem Efficiently simulate physics in games using probabilistic programming.
method Combines model-free and model-based approaches to improve efficiency.
result Model outperforms model-free or model-based approaches alone.
Higher-Order Generalization Bounds: Learning Deep Probabilistic Programs via PAC-Bayes Objectivescs.LG
Unified framework for learning flexible probabilistic programs using DPP and PAC-Bayes bounds.
problem Learning and generalizing from complex probabilistic models.
method Unified DPP representation and PAC-Bayes bounds for stochastic programs.
result Improved performance and generalization prediction using flexible DPP model representations and learned complexity measures.
Many practical techniques for probabilistic inference require a sequence of distributions that interpolate between a tractable distribution and an intractable distribution of interest. Usually, the sequences used are simple, e.g., based on geometric averages between distributions. When models are expressed as probabili…
Develops inference combinators for probabilistic programs using neural networks.
problem Creating efficient proposals for probabilistic program inference.
method Inference combinators using neural network parameterization of proposals.
result Correct by construction variational methods tailored to specific models.
We present the preliminary high-level design and features of DynamicPPL.jl, a modular library providing a lightning-fast infrastructure for probabilistic programming. Besides a computational performance that is often close to or better than Stan, DynamicPPL provides an intuitive DSL that allows the rapid development of…
Novel approach trains LLMs for inductive reasoning using probabilistic programs.
problem Training LLMs for inductive reasoning with sparse, ambiguous data.
method Program-based Posterior Training (PPT) using probabilistic inference.
result Significant improvement in estimation accuracy and alignment with human judgments.
We introduce and demonstrate a new approach to inference in expressive probabilistic programming languages based on particle Markov chain Monte Carlo. Our approach is simple to implement and easy to parallelize. It applies to Turing-complete probabilistic programming languages and supports accurate inference in models …
Bayesian approach for policy search in stochastic domains.
problem Policy search in stochastic domains.
method Nested probabilistic programs, Lightweight Metropolis-Hastings (LMH) adaptation.
result Similar quality policies learned with simpler algorithm.
This paper introduces a new technique for quantifying the approximation error of a broad class of probabilistic inference programs, including ones based on both variational and Monte Carlo approaches. The key idea is to derive a subjective bound on the symmetrized KL divergence between the distribution achieved by an a…
Probabilistic programming aids in automatically dating ice cores, reducing manual error and uncertainty.
problem Automatically dating ice cores with high accuracy and capturing uncertainty.
method Probabilistic models and probabilistic programming for automatic inference.
result Demonstrated the use of probabilistic programming for ice core dating, showcasing its benefits and limitations.
Compiling Stan to Generative Probabilistic Languages and Extension to Deep Probabilistic Programmingcs.LG
Stan is a probabilistic programming language that is popular in the statistics community, with a high-level syntax for expressing probabilistic models. Stan differs by nature from generative probabilistic programming languages like Church, Anglican, or Pyro. This paper presents a comprehensive compilation scheme to com…
Bayesian approach models neurodegenerative diseases without clinical labels.
problem Personalized, predictive modeling of neurodegenerative diseases.
method Probabilistic programmed deep kernel learning combining Gaussian processes and neural networks.
result Surpasses deep learning in accuracy and timeliness of predicting neurodegeneration.
Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are powerful modelling tools which allow to formalise our knowledge about the world and reason about its inherent uncertainty. Inference methods used in PPL can be computationally costly due to significant time burden and/or storage requirements; or they can lack theoretical g…
The idea of computer vision as the Bayesian inverse problem to computer graphics has a long history and an appealing elegance, but it has proved difficult to directly implement. Instead, most vision tasks are approached via complex bottom-up processing pipelines. Here we show that it is possible to write short, simple …
There is a widespread need for techniques that can discover structure from time series data. Recently introduced techniques such as Automatic Bayesian Covariance Discovery (ABCD) provide a way to find structure within a single time series by searching through a space of covariance kernels that is generated using a simp…
This paper introduces the probabilistic module interface, which allows encapsulation of complex probabilistic models with latent variables alongside custom stochastic approximate inference machinery, and provides a platform-agnostic abstraction barrier separating the model internals from the host probabilistic inferenc…
We consider probabilistic programming for birth-death models of evolution and introduce a new widely-applicable inference method that combines an extension of the alive particle filter (APF) with automatic Rao-Blackwellization via delayed sampling. Birth-death models of evolution are an important family of phylogenetic…
Databases are widespread, yet extracting relevant data can be difficult. Without substantial domain knowledge, multivariate search queries often return sparse or uninformative results. This paper introduces an approach for searching structured data based on probabilistic programming and nonparametric Bayes. Users speci…