Related papers: Variational Program Inference
Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…
Temperature sampling is a conventional approach to diversify large language model predictions. As temperature increases, the prediction becomes diverse but also vulnerable to hallucinations -- generating tokens that are sensible but not…
Pursuing invariant prediction from heterogeneous environments opens the door to learning causality in a purely data-driven way and has several applications in causal discovery and robust transfer learning. However, existing methods such as…
Over the years, integer linear programs have been employed to model inference in many natural language processing problems. This survey is meant to guide the reader through the process of framing a new inference problem as an instance of an…
Monte Carlo inference has asymptotic guarantees, but can be slow when using generic proposals. Handcrafted proposals that rely on user knowledge about the posterior distribution can be efficient, but are difficult to derive and implement.…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
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…
Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
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…
The inferential model (IM) framework provides valid prior-free probabilistic inference by focusing on predicting unobserved auxiliary variables. But, efficient IM-based inference can be challenging when the auxiliary variable is of higher…
We present a meta-algorithm for learning a posterior-inference algorithm for restricted probabilistic programs. Our meta-algorithm takes a training set of probabilistic programs that describe models with observations, and attempts to learn…
This paper proposes a causal inference relation and causal programming as general frameworks for causal inference with structural causal models. A tuple, $\langle M, I, Q, F \rangle$, is an instance of the relation if a formula, $F$,…
Diffusion models have demonstrated empirical successes in various applications and can be adapted to task-specific needs via guidance. This paper studies a form of gradient guidance for adapting a pre-trained diffusion model towards…
Even if path planning can be solved using standard techniques from dynamic programming and control, the problem can also be approached using probabilistic inference. The algorithms that emerge using the latter framework bear some appealing…
Gaussian processes (GPs) are a powerful tool for probabilistic inference over functions. They have been applied to both regression and non-linear dimensionality reduction, and offer desirable properties such as uncertainty estimates,…
Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…
We study discrete probabilistic programs with potentially unbounded looping behaviors over an infinite state space. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first decidability result for the problem of determining whether such a…
The causal (belief) network is a well-known graphical structure for representing independencies in a joint probability distribution. The exact methods and the approximation methods, which perform probabilistic inference in causal networks,…
Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…