Daniel Ritchie

Implement Stein Variational Gradient Descent

2

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dartml/project.html?p=vgd Only applicable in continuous spaces, but a neat idea doesn't require the definition of a variational family and should(?) be pretty easy to do in webppl with the infrastructure...

CPS breaks function order independence in the presence of function wrappers/decorators

6

WebPPL is fine with compiling this code: ``` var bar = function() { return 42; } var generate = function() { return foo(); } ``` but when compiling this code:...

valueRec and serialize are slow for large, recursive objects

1

The `MAP` aggregator calls `ad.valueRec` on all items that it adds, and the `Histogram` aggregator calls both `ad.valueRec` and `util.serialize`. These transformations make inference unusably slow when the program returns...

Thoughts on design of aggregators / marginal ERPs

2

I care a lot about non-discrete distributions, so I've been happy to see that there's been some work/thought put into different aggregators (`distribution`, `histogram`, `MAP`). It looks like this is...

Modified version of Adam that tracks the relative change in the objective value to better adapt the learning rate: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01505