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Alexander K. Lew

3 accepted papers

2025

Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlo

ICLR 2025oral

A wide range of LM applications require generating text that conforms to syntactic or semantic constraints. Imposing such constraints can be naturally framed as _probabilistic conditioning_, but exact generation from the resulting distribution—which can differ substantially from the LM’s base distri…

2023

SMCP3: Sequential Monte Carlo with Probabilistic Program Proposals

AISTATS 2023poster

This paper introduces SMCP3, a method for automatically implementing custom sequential Monte Carlo samplers for inference in probabilistic programs. Unlike particle filters and resample-move SMC (Gilks and Berzuini, 2001), SMCP3 algorithms can improve the quality of samples and weights using pairs o…

2022

Recursive Monte Carlo and variational inference with auxiliary variables

UAI 2022poster

A key design constraint when implementing Monte Carlo and variational inference algorithms is that it must be possible to cheaply and exactly evaluate the marginal densities of proposal distributions and variational families. This takes many interesting proposals off the table, such as those based o…