A Domain-Specific PPL for Reasoning about Reasoning (or: a memo on memo)
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 JanDisplayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
11:00 40mTalk | Invited talk: TORAX - A Fast and Differentiable Tokamak Transport Simulator in JAX (Remote) LAFI Jonathan Citrin Google Deepmind | ||
11:41 15mTalk | Data-Parallel Differentiation by Optic Composition LAFI | ||
11:57 15mTalk | 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 15mTalk | 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 |