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arXiv 2005.09089cs.PL
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离散概率规划的标度精确推理

Scaling Exact Inference for Discrete Probabilistic Programs

Steven Holtzen, Guy Van den Broeck, Todd Millstein

摘要:

概率程序设计语言(Probabilistic programming language,PPL)是一种表示和推理概率模型的表达手段。概率推理的计算挑战仍然是PPL在实践中应用的主要障碍。推理从根本上说是困难的,所以没有一个放之四海而皆准的解决方案。在这项工作中,我们的目标可扩展推理的一类重要的概率程序:那些概率分布是离散的。离散分布在许多领域都很常见,包括文本分析,网络验证,人工智能和图形分析,但它们被证明是具有挑战性的现有PPL。我们开发了一个特定于域的概率程序设计语言称为骰子,其特点是一种新的方法来精确的离散概率程序推理。Dice利用程序结构来分解推理,使我们能够对具有数十万随机变量的概率程序进行精确推理。我们的主要技术贡献是一个新的减少从离散概率程序加权模型计数(WMC)。这种简化将分布的结构与其参数分离,使逻辑推理工具能够利用该结构进行概率推理。我们(1)展示了如何将Dice推理组合地减少到WMC,(2)证明这种编译相对于指称语义是正确的,(3)经验性地证明了与先前方法相比的性能优势,以及(4)分析了允许Dice扩展到大型概率程序的结构类型。

英文摘要:

Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are an expressive means of representing and reasoning about probabilistic models. The computational challenge of probabilistic inference remains the primary roadblock for applying PPLs in practice. Inference is fundamentally hard, so there is no one-size-fits all solution. In this work, we target scalable inference for an important class of probabilistic programs: those whose probability distributions are discrete. Discrete distributions are common in many fields, including text analysis, network verification, artificial intelligence, and graph analysis, but they prove to be challenging for existing PPLs. We develop a domain-specific probabilistic programming language called Dice that features a new approach to exact discrete probabilistic program inference. Dice exploits program structure in order to factorize inference, enabling us to perform exact inference on probabilistic programs with hundreds of thousands of random variables. Our key technical contribution is a new reduction from discrete probabilistic programs to weighted model counting (WMC). This reduction separates the structure of the distribution from its parameters, enabling logical reasoning tools to exploit that structure for probabilistic inference. We (1) show how to compositionally reduce Dice inference to WMC, (2) prove this compilation correct with respect to a denotational semantics, (3) empirically demonstrate the performance benefits over prior approaches, and (4) analyze the types of structure that allow Dice to scale to large probabilistic programs.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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