Related papers: Improving the Efficiency of Approximate Inference …
We consider the hardness of approximation of optimization problems from the point of view of definability. For many NP-hard optimization problems it is known that, unless P = NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can give an approximate solution…
Computational models of human language often involve combinatorial problems. For instance, a probabilistic parser may marginalize over exponentially many trees to make predictions. Algorithms for such problems often employ dynamic…
Deep learning requires regularization mechanisms to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. We address this problem by a new regularization method based on distributional robust optimization. The key idea is to modify the…
Much algorithmic research in NLP aims to efficiently manipulate rich formal structures. An algorithm designer typically seeks to provide guarantees about their proposed algorithm -- for example, that its running time or space complexity is…
Superoptimization requires the estimation of the best program for a given computational task. In order to deal with large programs, superoptimization techniques perform a stochastic search. This involves proposing a modification of the…
We present new algorithms and fast implementations to find efficient approximations for modelling stochastic processes. For many numerical computations it is essential to develop finite approximations for stochastic processes. While the…
This thesis describes work on two applications of probabilistic programming: the learning of probabilistic program code given specifications, in particular program code of one-dimensional samplers; and the facilitation of sequential Monte…
Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under…
Intelligent systems sometimes need to infer the probable goals of people, cars, and robots, based on partial observations of their motion. This paper introduces a class of probabilistic programs for formulating and solving these problems.…
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…
This paper describes a class of probabilistic approximation algorithms based on bucket elimination which offer adjustable levels of accuracy and efficiency. We analyze the approximation for several tasks: finding the most probable…
One important challenge for probabilistic logics is reasoning with very large knowledge bases (KBs) of imperfect information, such as those produced by modern web-scale information extraction systems. One scalability problem shared by many…
In this paper, we consider the problem of lifted inference in the context of Prism-like probabilistic logic programming languages. Traditional inference in such languages involves the construction of an explanation graph for the query and…
Sampling is a basic operation in many inference-time algorithms of large language models (LLMs). To scale up inference efficiently with a limited compute, it is crucial to find an optimal allocation for sample compute budgets: Which…
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 paper addresses two central problems for probabilistic processing models: parameter estimation from incomplete data and efficient retrieval of most probable analyses. These questions have been answered satisfactorily only for…
The growing amount of applications that generate vast amount of data in short time scales render the problem of partial monitoring, coupled with prediction, a rather fundamental one. We study the aforementioned canonical problem under the…
We introduce a statistical physics inspired supervised machine learning algorithm for classification and regression problems. The method is based on the invariances or stability of predicted results when known data is represented as…
The analysis of decision making under uncertainty is closely related to the analysis of probabilistic inference. Indeed, much of the research into efficient methods for probabilistic inference in expert systems has been motivated by the…
Probabilistic programming provides the means to represent and reason about complex probabilistic models using programming language constructs. Even simple probabilistic programs can produce models with infinitely many variables. Factored…