14 accepted papers
Human visual perception offers valuable insights for understanding computational principles of motion-based scene interpretation. Humans robustly detect and segment moving entities that constitute independently moveable chunks of matter, whether observing sparse moving dots, textured surfaces, or na
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…
Integrated task and motion planning (TAMP) has proven to be a valuable approach to generalizable long-horizon robotic manipulation and navigation problems. However, the typical TAMP problem formulation assumes full observability and deterministic action effects. These assumptions limit the ability o…
This paper presents a new approach to automatically discovering accurate models of complex time series data. Working within a Bayesian nonparametric prior over a symbolic space of Gaussian process time series models, we present a novel structure learning algorithm that integrates sequential Monte Ca…
Estimating information-theoretic quantities such as entropy and mutual information is central to many problems in statistics and machine learning, but challenging in high dimensions. This paper presents
We present 3DP3, a framework for inverse graphics that uses inference in a structured generative model of objects, scenes, and images. 3DP3 uses (i) voxel models to represent the 3D shape of objects, (ii) hierarchical scene graphs to decompose scenes into objects and the contacts between them, and (…
Data cleaning is naturally framed as probabilistic inference in a generative model of ground-truth data and likely errors, but the diversity of real-world error patterns and the hardness of inference make Bayesian approaches difficult to automate. We present PClean, a probabilistic programming langu…
Latent confounders—unobserved variables that influence both treatment and outcome—can bias estimates of causal effects. In some cases, these confounders are shared across observations, e.g. all students taking a course are influenced by the course’s difficulty in addition to any educational interven…
This paper introduces a new algorithm for the fundamental problem of generating a random integer from a discrete probability distribution using a source of independent and unbiased random coin flips. We prove that this algorithm, which we call the Fast Loaded Dice Roller (FLDR), is highly efficient…
This article proposes a Bayesian nonparametric method for forecasting, imputation, and clustering in sparsely observed, multivariate time series data. The method is appropriate for jointly modeling hundreds of time series with widely varying, non-stationary dynamics. Given a collection of $N$ time s…
Datasets with hundreds of variables and many missing values are commonplace. In this setting, it is both statistically and computationally challenging to detect true predictive relationships between variables and also to suppress false positives. This paper proposes an approach that combines probabi…
Markov jump processes (MJPs) are used to model a wide range of phenomenon from disease progression to RNA path folding. However, existing methods suffer from a number of shortcomings: degenerate trajectories in the case of ML estimation of parametric models and poor inferential performance in the ca…
Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques rank among current state-of-the-art methods for probabilistic program inference. A drawback of these techniques is that they rely on importance resampling, which results in degenerate particle trajectories and a low effective sample size for variables sam…
Recent progress on probabilistic modeling and statistical learning, coupled with the availability of large training datasets, has led to remarkable progress in computer vision. Generative probabilistic models, or analysis-by-synthesis approaches, can capture rich scene structure but have been less w…