Related papers: Black-Box Policy Search with Probabilistic Program…
The classical approach to system identification is based on stochastic assumptions about the measurement error, and provides estimates that have random nature. Worst-case identification, on the other hand, only assumes the knowledge of…
Solving a decision theory problem usually involves finding the actions, among a set of possible ones, which optimize the expected reward, possibly accounting for the uncertainty of the environment. In this paper, we introduce the…
Probabilistic programs are typically normal-looking programs describing posterior probability distributions. They intrinsically code up randomized algorithms and have long been at the heart of modern machine learning and approximate…
Being able to provide counterfactual interventions - sequences of actions we would have had to take for a desirable outcome to happen - is essential to explain how to change an unfavourable decision by a black-box machine learning model…
Probabilistic models learned as density estimators can be exploited in representation learning beside being toolboxes used to answer inference queries only. However, how to extract useful representations highly depends on the particular…
Probabilistic programming languages allow programmers to write down conditional probability distributions that represent statistical and machine learning models as programs that use observe statements. These programs are run by accumulating…
We present a new algorithm for probabilistic planning with no observability. Our algorithm, called Probabilistic-FF, extends the heuristic forward-search machinery of Conformant-FF to problems with probabilistic uncertainty about both the…
Decision theories offer principled methods for making choices under various types of uncertainty. Algorithms that implement these theories have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems, including materials and drug…
Black-box optimization refers to the optimization problem whose objective function and/or constraint sets are either unknown, inaccessible, or non-existent. In many applications, especially with the involvement of humans, the only way to…
We present a fully probabilistic approach for solving binary optimization problems with black-box objective functions and with budget constraints. In the probabilistic approach, the optimization variable is viewed as a random variable and…
Agents are small programs that autonomously take actions based on changes in their environment or ``state.'' Over the last few years, there have been an increasing number of efforts to build agents that can interact and/or collaborate with…
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…
Probabilistic programming has become a standard practice to model stochastic events and learn about the behavior of nature in different scientific contexts, ranging from Genetics and Ecology to Linguistics and Psychology. However, domain…
In many important design problems, some decisions should be made by finding the global optimum of a multiextremal objective function subject to a set of constrains. Frequently, especially in engineering applications, the functions involved…
This paper focuses on designing expert systems to support decision making in complex, uncertain environments. In this context, our research indicates that strictly probabilistic representations, which enable the use of decision-theoretic…
We propose the use of probabilistic programming techniques to tackle the malicious user identification problem in a recommendation algorithm. Probabilistic programming provides numerous advantages over other techniques, including but not…
Probabilistic logic programs are logic programs where some facts hold with a specified probability. Here, we investigate these programs with a causal framework that allows counterfactual queries. Learning the program structure from…
We deliver a call to arms for probabilistic numerical methods: algorithms for numerical tasks, including linear algebra, integration, optimization and solving differential equations, that return uncertainties in their calculations. Such…
We study weighted programming, a programming paradigm for specifying mathematical models. More specifically, the weighted programs we investigate are like usual imperative programs with two additional features: (1) nondeterministic…
In this paper, we consider the classic stochastic (dynamic) knapsack problem, a fundamental mathematical model in revenue management, with general time-varying random demand. Our main goal is to study the optimal policies, which can be…