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A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-06 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

Augmenting the multi-step reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a persistent challenge. Recently, verification has shown promise in improving solution consistency by evaluating generated outputs. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shengyu Feng , Xiang Kong , Shuang Ma , Aonan Zhang , Dong Yin , Chong Wang , Ruoming Pang , Yiming Yang

There are many different probabilistic programming languages that are specialized to specific kinds of probabilistic programs. From a usability and scalability perspective, this is undesirable: today, probabilistic programmers are forced…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Sam Stites , John M. Li , Steven Holtzen

Probabilistic programs with mixed support (both continuous and discrete latent random variables) commonly appear in many probabilistic programming systems (PPSs). However, the existence of the discrete random variables prohibits many basic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 David Tolpin , Yuan Zhou , Hongseok Yang

We study provably correct and efficient instantiations of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) inference in the context of formal operational semantics of Probabilistic Programs (PPs). We focus on universal PPs featuring sampling from arbitrary…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Michele Boreale , Luisa Collodi

We study provably correct and efficient instantiations of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) inference in the context of formal operational semantics of Probabilistic Programs (PPs). We focus on universal PPs featuring sampling from arbitrary…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Michele Boreale , Luisa Collodi

We present the Sum-Product Probabilistic Language (SPPL), a new probabilistic programming language that automatically delivers exact solutions to a broad range of probabilistic inference queries. SPPL translates probabilistic programs into…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Feras A. Saad , Martin C. Rinard , Vikash K. Mansinghka

This book is a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic programming. It not only provides a thorough background for anyone wishing to use a probabilistic programming system, but also introduces the techniques needed to design and build…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-20 Jan-Willem van de Meent , Brooks Paige , Hongseok Yang , Frank Wood

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of techniques to sample approximately from any sequence of probability distributions using a combination of importance sampling and resampling steps. This paper is concerned with the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-03-05 Pierre Del Moral , Arnaud Doucet , Ajay Jasra

Compared to the wide array of advanced Monte Carlo methods supported by modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), PPL support for variational inference (VI) is less developed: users are typically limited to a predefined selection…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-06-25 McCoy R. Becker , Alexander K. Lew , Xiaoyan Wang , Matin Ghavami , Mathieu Huot , Martin C. Rinard , Vikash K. Mansinghka

A wide range of LM applications require generating text that conforms to syntactic or semantic constraints. Imposing such constraints can be naturally framed as probabilistic conditioning, but exact generation from the resulting…

Probabilistic Programming Languages (PPLs) are a powerful tool in machine learning, allowing highly expressive generative models to be expressed succinctly. They couple complex inference algorithms, implemented by the language, with an…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Alexander Collins , Vinod Grover

In the following paper we provide a review and development of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods for option pricing. SMC are a class of Monte Carlo-based algorithms, that are designed to approximate expectations w.r.t a sequence of…

Computation · Statistics 2010-05-27 Ajay Jasra , Pierre Del Moral

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods represent a classical set of techniques to simulate a sequence of probability measures through a simple selection/mutation mechanism. However, the associated selection functions and mutation kernels…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-16 Qiming Du , Arnaud Guyader

Probabilistic programming is a programming paradigm for expressing flexible probabilistic models. Implementations of probabilistic programming languages employ a variety of inference algorithms, where sequential Monte Carlo methods are…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-12-19 Daniel Lundén , David Broman , Fredrik Ronquist , Lawrence M. Murray

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Yura N Perov

In online clustering problems, there is often a large amount of uncertainty over possible cluster assignments that cannot be resolved until more data are observed. This difficulty is compounded when clusters follow complex distributions, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Connie Trojan , Pavel Myshkov , Paul Fearnhead , James Hensman , Tom Minka , Christopher Nemeth

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of Monte Carlo methods that are used to obtain random samples of a high dimensional random variable in a sequential fashion. Many problems encountered in applications often involve different…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-20 Chencheng Cai , Rong Chen , Ming Lin

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-11 Yura N. Perov , Frank D. Wood

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a class of algorithms that approximate high-dimensional expectations of a Markov chain. SMC algorithms typically include a resampling step. There are many possible ways to resample, but the relative…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-04-01 Robert J. Webber