A Domain-Specific Probabilistic Programming Language 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.
Fri 17 OctDisplayed time zone: Perth change
16:00 - 17:30 | |||
16:00 15mTalk | A Domain-Specific Probabilistic Programming Language for Reasoning about Reasoning (or: a memo on memo) OOPSLA Kartik Chandra MIT, Tony Chen MIT, Joshua B. Tenenbaum Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
16:15 15mTalk | ROSpec: A Domain-Specific Language for ROS-based Robot Software OOPSLA Paulo Canelas Carnegie Mellon University, Bradley Schmerl School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Alcides Fonseca LASIGE; University of Lisbon, Christopher Steven Timperley Carnegie Mellon University DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
16:30 15mTalk | Large Language Model powered Symbolic Execution OOPSLA Yihe Li National University of Singapore, Ruijie Meng National University of Singapore, Singapore, Gregory J. Duck National University of Singapore | ||
16:45 15mTalk | Multi-Language Probabilistic Programming OOPSLA Sam Stites Northeastern University, John Li Northeastern University, Steven Holtzen Northeastern University | ||
17:00 15mTalk | Polymorphic Records for Dynamic Languages OOPSLA | ||