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This paper introduces the Fusemate probabilistic logic programming system. Fusemate's inference engine comprises a grounding component and a variable elimination method for probabilistic inference. Fusemate differs from most other systems…
Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…
Bayesian optimal design is considered for experiments where the response distribution depends on the solution to a system of non-linear ordinary differential equations. The motivation is an experiment to estimate parameters in the equations…
It was recently shown that the problem of decoding messages transmitted through a noisy channel can be formulated as a belief updating task over a probabilistic network [McEliece]. Moreover, it was observed that iterative application of the…
Empirical investigations into unintended model behavior often show that the algorithm is predicting another outcome than what was intended. These exposes highlight the need to identify when algorithms predict unintended quantities - ideally…
Rigorous statistical methods, including parameter estimation with accompanying uncertainties, underpin the validity of scientific discovery, especially in the natural sciences. With increasingly complex data models such as deep learning…
We propose a novel polyhedral uncertainty set for robust optimization, termed the smooth uncertainty set, which captures dependencies of uncertain parameters by constraining their pairwise differences. The bounds on these differences may be…
We present an algorithmic solution to the problem of incremental belief updating in the context of Monte Carlo inference in Bayesian statistical models represented by probabilistic programs. Given a model and a sample-approximated…
We present a static analysis technique for non-termination inference of logic programs. Our framework relies on an extension of the subsumption test, where some specific argument positions can be instantiated while others are generalized.…
We introduce an approach to inferring the causal architecture of stochastic dynamical systems that extends rate distortion theory to use causal shielding---a natural principle of learning. We study two distinct cases of causal inference:…
Probabilistic programming systems enable users to encode model structure and naturally reason about uncertainties, which can be leveraged towards improved Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. Here we present a probabilistic program embedding…
In the last couple of decades, there has been major advancements in the domain of missing data imputation. The techniques in the domain include amongst others: Expectation Maximization, Neural Networks with Evolutionary Algorithms or…
We study the incremental knapsack problem, where one wishes to sequentially pack items into a knapsack whose capacity expands over a finite planning horizon, with the objective of maximizing time-averaged profits. While various…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
This paper proposes several novel optimization algorithms for minimizing a nonlinear objective function. The algorithms are enlightened by the optimal state trajectory of an optimal control problem closely related to the minimized objective…
Optimization algorithms can be interpreted through the lens of dynamical systems as the interconnection of linear systems and a set of subgradient nonlinearities. This dynamical systems formulation allows for the analysis and synthesis of…
Inference is a fundamental reasoning technique in probability theory. When applied to a large joint distribution, it involves updating with evidence (conditioning) in one or more components (variables) and computing the outcome in other…
Probabilistic programming is the idea of writing models from statistics and machine learning using program notations and reasoning about these models using generic inference engines. Recently its combination with deep learning has been…
We present a unified logical framework for representing and reasoning about both probability quantitative and qualitative preferences in probability answer set programming, called probability answer set optimization programs. The proposed…
Many problems in robotics involve both continuous and discrete components, and modeling them together for estimation tasks has been a long standing and difficult problem. Hybrid Factor Graphs give us a mathematical framework to model these…