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Poster

Predicate Exchange: Inference with Declarative Knowledge

Zenna Tavares · Javier Burroni · Edgar Minasyan · Armando Solar-Lezama · Rajesh Ranganath

Pacific Ballroom #52

Keywords: [ Probabilistic Programming ]


Abstract:

Programming languages allow us to express complex predicates, but existing inference methods are unable to condition probabilistic models on most of them. To support a broader class of predicates, we develop an inference procedure called predicate exchange, which softens predicates. A soft predicate quantifies the extent to which values of model variables are consistent with its hard counterpart. We substitute the likelihood term in the Bayesian posterior with a soft predicate, and develop a variant of replica exchange MCMC to draw posterior samples. We implement predicate exchange as a language agnostic tool which performs a nonstandard execution of a probabilistic program. We demonstrate the approach on sequence models of health and inverse rendering.

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