论文标题
随机上可区分的概率程序
Stochastically Differentiable Probabilistic Programs
论文作者
论文摘要
在许多概率编程系统(PPSS)中,通常出现具有混合支持(连续和离散的潜在随机变量)的概率程序。但是,离散随机变量的存在禁止许多基于梯度的推理引擎,这使得在此类模型上的推理程序特别具有挑战性。现有的PPS要么要求用户手动将离散变量边缘化,要么通过在离散和连续变量上分别运行推理来执行构图推断。在大多数情况下,前者是不可行的,而后者有一些根本的缺点。我们提出了一种新的方法,可以在此类程序中使用随机梯度马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛家族的算法有效地进行推理。我们将基于随机梯度的推理算法与常规基线进行比较,在几种具有混合支持的概率计划的情况下,它表明它的表现优于现有的组成推理基准,并且在该程序边缘化版本中的作用几乎和推理相同,但编程工作和较低的计算成本都较少。
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 gradient-based inference engines, which makes the inference procedure on such models particularly challenging. Existing PPSs either require the user to manually marginalize out the discrete variables or to perform a composing inference by running inference separately on discrete and continuous variables. The former is infeasible in most cases whereas the latter has some fundamental shortcomings. We present a novel approach to run inference efficiently and robustly in such programs using stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo family of algorithms. We compare our stochastic gradient-based inference algorithm against conventional baselines in several important cases of probabilistic programs with mixed support, and demonstrate that it outperforms existing composing inference baselines and works almost as well as inference in marginalized versions of the programs, but with less programming effort and at a lower computation cost.