POPL 2025
Sun 19 - Sat 25 January 2025 Denver, Colorado, United States
Sun 19 Jan 2025 12:13 - 12:28 at Peek-A-Boo - Second session Chair(s): Atılım Güneş Baydin

The human ability to think about thinking (“theory of mind”) is a fundamental object of study in many disciplines. In recent decades, researchers across these disciplines have converged on a rich computational paradigm for modeling theory of mind, grounded in recursive probabilistic reasoning. However, practitioners often find programming in this paradigm extremely challenging: first, because thinking-about-thinking is confusing for programmers, and second, because models are extremely slow to run. This paper presents memo, a new domain-specific probabilistic programming language that overcomes these challenges: first, by providing specialized syntax and semantics for theory of mind, and second, by taking a unique approach to inference that scales well on modern hardware via array programming. memo enables practitioners to write dramatically faster models with much less code, and has already been adopted by several research groups.

Sun 19 Jan

Displayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:30
Second sessionLAFI at Peek-A-Boo
Chair(s): Atılım Güneş Baydin University of Oxford
11:00
40m
Talk
Invited talk: TORAX - A Fast and Differentiable Tokamak Transport Simulator in JAX (Remote)
LAFI
Jonathan Citrin Google Deepmind
11:41
15m
Talk
Data-Parallel Differentiation by Optic Composition
LAFI
Paul Wilson University of Southampton, Fabio Zanasi University College London
11:57
15m
Talk
Data-oriented Design for Differentiable, Probabilistic Programming (Remote)
LAFI
Owen Lynch University of Oxford, Maria-Nicoleta Craciun University of Oxford, Younesse Kaddar University of Oxford, Sam Staton University of Oxford
12:13
15m
Talk
A Domain-Specific PPL for Reasoning about Reasoning (or: a memo on memo)
LAFI
Kartik Chandra MIT, Tony Chen MIT, Joshua B. Tenenbaum Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley Massachusetts Institute of Technology