Related papers: Variational Program Inference
Although large language models rely on chain-of-thought for complex reasoning, the overthinking phenomenon severely degrades inference efficiency. Existing reinforcement learning methods compress reasoning chains by designing elaborate…
Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape, and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion. Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately modelling the…
Guidance serves as a key concept in diffusion models, yet its effectiveness is often limited by the need for extra data annotation or classifier pretraining. That is why guidance was harnessed from self-supervised learning backbones, like…
The inference-time resource costs of large language and vision models present a growing challenge in production deployments. We propose the use of foundation model programs, i.e., programs that can invoke foundation models with varying…
Inference algorithms for probabilistic programming are complex imperative programs with many moving parts. Efficient inference often requires customising an algorithm to a particular probabilistic model or problem, sometimes called…
We consider the task of performing probabilistic inference with probabilistic logical models. Many algorithms for approximate inference with such models are based on sampling. From a logic programming perspective, sampling boils down to…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
We propose a new method to approximate the posterior distribution of probabilistic programs by means of computing guaranteed bounds. The starting point of our work is an interval-based trace semantics for a recursive, higher-order…
We present an exact Bayesian inference method for inferring posterior distributions encoded by probabilistic programs featuring possibly unbounded loops. Our method is built on a denotational semantics represented by probability generating…
We consider the problem of refuting equivalence of probabilistic programs, i.e., the problem of proving that two probabilistic programs induce different output distributions. We study this problem in the context of programs with…
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…
Probabilistic inference algorithms such as Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) provide powerful tools for constraining procedural models in computer graphics, but they require many samples to produce desirable results. In this paper, we show how…
The impact of machine learning models on healthcare will depend on the degree of trust that healthcare professionals place in the predictions made by these models. In this paper, we present a method to provide people with clinical expertise…
Counterfactual explanations are attracting significant attention due to the flourishing applications of machine learning models in consequential domains. A counterfactual plan consists of multiple possibilities to modify a given instance so…
The belief network is a well-known graphical structure for representing independences in a joint probability distribution. The methods, which perform probabilistic inference in belief networks, often treat the conditional probabilities…
Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…
Diffusion models benefit from instillation of task-specific information into the score function to steer the sample generation towards desired properties. Such information is coined as guidance. For example, in text-to-image synthesis, text…
When writing a constraint program, we have to choose which variables should be the decision variables, and how to represent the constraints on these variables. In many cases, there is considerable choice for the decision variables.…
Probabilistic programming makes it easy to represent a probabilistic model as a program. Building an individual model, however, is only one step of probabilistic modeling. The broader challenge of probabilistic modeling is in understanding…
Hierarchical models with gamma hyperpriors provide a flexible, sparse-promoting framework to bridge $L^1$ and $L^2$ regularizations in Bayesian formulations to inverse problems. Despite the Bayesian motivation for these models, existing…