Related papers: Black-Box Policy Search with Probabilistic Program…
Existing decision-theoretic reasoning frameworks such as decision networks use simple data structures and processes. However, decisions are often made based on complex data structures, such as social networks and protein sequences, and rich…
Spreadsheet workbook contents are simple programs. Because of this, probabilistic programming techniques can be used to perform Bayesian inversion of spreadsheet computations. What is more, existing execution engines in spreadsheet…
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.…
Predictive modelling and supervised learning are central to modern data science. With predictions from an ever-expanding number of supervised black-box strategies - e.g., kernel methods, random forests, deep learning aka neural networks -…
Estimating percentiles of black-box deterministic functions with random inputs is a challenging task when the number of function evaluations is severely restricted, which is typical for computer experiments. This article proposes two new…
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…
Deterministic policies are often preferred over stochastic ones when implemented on physical systems. They can prevent erratic and harmful behaviors while being easier to implement and interpret. However, in practice, exploration is largely…
We provide methods for in-database support of decision making under uncertainty. Many important decision problems correspond to selecting a package (bag of tuples in a relational database) that jointly satisfy a set of constraints while…
We present probabilistic neural programs, a framework for program induction that permits flexible specification of both a computational model and inference algorithm while simultaneously enabling the use of deep neural networks.…
Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…
In this article, we discuss two algorithms tailored to discrete-time deterministic finite-horizon nonlinear optimal control problems or so-called deterministic trajectory optimization problems. Both algorithms can be derived from an…
Probabilistic programs encode stochastic models as ordinary-looking programs with primitives for sampling numbers from predefined distributions and conditioning. Their applications include, among many others, machine learning and modeling…
We tackle the problem of conditioning probabilistic programs on distributions of observable variables. Probabilistic programs are usually conditioned on samples from the joint data distribution, which we refer to as deterministic…
Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce scenario based stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables, which we can set, and stochastic…
Programs that combine I/O and countable probabilistic choice, modulo either bisimilarity or trace equivalence, can be seen as describing a probabilistic strategy. For well-founded programs, we might expect to axiomatize bisimilarity via a…
Probabilistic programming is perfectly suited to reliable and transparent data science, as it allows the user to specify their models in a high-level language without worrying about the complexities of how to fit the models. Static analysis…
We solve a sequential decision-making problem under uncertainty that takes into account the failure probability of a task. This problem cannot be handled by the stochastic shortest path problem, which is the standard model for sequential…
Deep learning algorithms have recently shown to be a successful tool in estimating parameters of statistical models for which simulation is easy, but likelihood computation is challenging. But the success of these approaches depends on…
Explaining and reasoning about processes which underlie observed black-box phenomena enables the discovery of causal mechanisms, derivation of suitable abstract representations and the formulation of more robust predictions. We propose to…