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Many of today's probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) have brittle inference performance: the performance of the underlying inference algorithm is very sensitive to the precise way in which the probabilistic program is written. A…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
In several implementations of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods it is natural, and important in terms of algorithmic efficiency, to exploit the information of the history of the samples to optimally tune their subsequent propagations. In…
Hyperproperties have shown to be a powerful tool for expressing and reasoning about information-flow security policies. In this paper, we investigate the problem of statistical model checking (SMC) for hyperproperties. Unlike exhaustive…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…
We provide a framework which admits a number of ``marginal'' sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms as particular cases -- including the marginal particle filter [Klaas et al., 2005, in: Proceedings of Uncertainty in Artificial…
This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…
Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…
We consider the computation of the permanent of a binary n by n matrix. It is well- known that the exact computation is a #P complete problem. A variety of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computational algorithms have been introduced in the…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful algorithm to sample latent variables from Bayesian models. The advent of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) frees users from writing inference algorithms and lets users focus on modeling.…
Probabilistic databases play a crucial role in the management and understanding of uncertain data. However, incorporating probabilities into the semantics of incomplete databases has posed many challenges, forcing systems to sacrifice…
Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are a popular tool for high-level modelling across many fields. They provide a range of algorithms for probabilistic inference, which analyse models by learning their parameters from a dataset or…
We present a formulation of the problem of probabilistic model checking as one of query evaluation over probabilistic logic programs. To the best of our knowledge, our formulation is the first of its kind, and it covers a rich class of…
We develop a new Low-level, First-order Probabilistic Programming Language (LF-PPL) suited for models containing a mix of continuous, discrete, and/or piecewise-continuous variables. The key success of this language and its compilation…
Satisfiability Modulo Counting (SMC) is a recently proposed general language to reason about problems integrating statistical and symbolic Artificial Intelligence. An SMC problem is an extended SAT problem in which the truth values of a few…
Data cleaning is naturally framed as probabilistic inference in a generative model of ground-truth data and likely errors, but the diversity of real-world error patterns and the hardness of inference make Bayesian approaches difficult to…
Today, many different probabilistic programming languages exist and even more inference mechanisms for these languages. Still, most logic programming based languages use backward reasoning based on SLD resolution for inference. While these…
This paper concerns the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods (SMC) for smoothing in general state space models. A well-known problem when applying the standard SMC technique in the smoothing mode is that the resampling mechanism introduces…
We build on auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo (AESMC): a method for model and proposal learning based on maximizing the lower bound to the log marginal likelihood in a broad family of structured probabilistic models. Our approach relies…
The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…