Fri 22 Jun 2018 11:00 - 11:25 at Grand Ballroom CD - Inference for Probabilistic Programs Chair(s): Arjun Guha

We present a novel approach for approximate sampling in probabilistic programs based on incremental inference. The key idea is to adapt the samples for a program P into samples for a program Q, thereby avoiding the expensive sampling computation for program Q. To enable incremental inference in probabilistic programming, our work: (i) introduces the concept of a trace translator which adapts samples from P into samples of Q, (ii) phrases this translation approach in the context of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), which gives theoretical guarantees that the adapted samples converge to the distribution induced by Q, and (iii) shows how to obtain a concrete trace translator by establishing a correspondence between the random choices of the two probabilistic programs. We implemented our approach in two different probabilistic programming systems and showed that, compared to methods that sample the program Q from scratch, incremental inference can lead to orders of magnitude increase in efficiency, depending on how closely related P and Q are.

Fri 22 Jun

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11:00 - 12:15
Inference for Probabilistic ProgramsPLDI Research Papers at Grand Ballroom CD
Chair(s): Arjun Guha University of Massachusetts, Amherst
11:00
25m
Talk
Incremental Inference for Probabilistic Programs
PLDI Research Papers
Marco Cusumano-Towner MIT-CSAIL, Benjamin Bichsel ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Timon Gehr , Martin Vechev ETH Zürich, Vikash K. Mansinghka MIT
Media Attached
11:25
25m
Talk
Bayonet: Probabilistic Inference for Networks
PLDI Research Papers
Timon Gehr , Sasa Misailovic University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, Petar Tsankov ETH Zurich, Laurent Vanbever ETH Zürich, Pascal Wiesmann ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Martin Vechev ETH Zürich
Media Attached
11:50
25m
Talk
Probabilistic Programming with Programmable Inference
PLDI Research Papers
Vikash K. Mansinghka MIT, Ulrich Schaechtle Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, Shivam Handa , Alexey Radul , Yutian Chen Google Deepmind, n.n., Martin C. Rinard Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Media Attached