[HN Gopher] Reactive Probabilistic Programming ___________________________________________________________________ Reactive Probabilistic Programming Author : matt_d Score : 40 points Date : 2020-07-20 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arxiv.org) (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org) | jefft255 wrote: | From my robotics point of view, probabilistic programming looks | really attractive, and this paper seems to give very | interesting/neat examples for control and Kalman filtering. | | I wonder what has prevented these languages from being widely | adopted by the robotics community? My suspicion is that it's | always easier to work with general purpose languages, but even | then "probabilistic programming libraries" for Python, e.g. Pyro | or Edward, haven't really taken off either... Most people write | SLAM algorithms in C++ and don't pay much attention to what the | PPL people are doing. | ssivark wrote: | I think we're still on the path to making (efficient) inference | work for broader classes of problems (expressive problem | formulation). One of the most interesting recent projects I've | come across is "Gen" by the probcomp group at MIT (BTW, a lot | of interesting work related to PPL seems to be happening in the | Julia language). | mccoyb wrote: | I'm happy someone mentioned the community in Julia! | | We're always looking for interested people to join and try | out some of the systems. For easy access to some of the | active PP frameworks: | | Turing.jl https://turing.ml/dev/ | | Gen.jl https://www.gen.dev/ | | Soss.jl https://github.com/cscherrer/Soss.jl | | Jaynes.jl https://github.com/femtomc/Jaynes.jl | | Why so many? The design space is just beginning to be well- | explored. Gen.jl + Jaynes.jl are really research projects | aiming to push the boundary of what you can express inside a | PP framework. Gen.jl is much more mature than the latter | (which I develop) and has tons of great and thought-provoking | documentation. Turing.jl is also very mature, and they have a | great number of resources showing how to express a number of | classic models in their language, as well as how to compose | sampling-based inference algorithms. Soss.jl is also very | cool - and works by AST re-writing. I'm not sure the state of | the docs for Soss.jl - but the researchers for each of these | systems are always willing to discuss the systems on the | Julia Slack or Zulia! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-07-20 23:00 UTC)