2018

Effect Handling for Composable Program Transformations in Edward2

Moore, Dave, Gorinova, Maria I.

Understand

Algebraic effects and handlers have emerged in the programming languages community as a convenient, modular abstraction for controlling computational effects.

  • They have found several applications including concurrent programming, meta programming, and more recently, probabilistic programming, as part of Pyro's Poutines library.
  • We investigate the use of effect handlers as a lightweight abstraction for implementing probabilistic programming languages (PPLs).
  • We interpret the existing design of Edward2 as an accidental implementation of an effect-handling mechanism, and extend that design to support nested, composable transformations.

Built on

  • Adequacy for Algebraic Effects. In Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures

    Gordon Plotkin and John Power. 2001 · 2001

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Handlers of Algebraic Effects. In Programming Languages and Systems

    Gordon Plotkin and Matija Pretnar. 2009 · 2009

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Automated variational inference in probabilistic programming

    Original

    David Wingate and Theophane Weber. 2013 · 2013

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • Variational dropout and the local reparameterization trick. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems

    Diederik P Kingma, Tim Salimans, and Max Welling. 2015 · 2015

    Earlier work this paper cites.

Similar

  • An Introduction to Algebraic Effects and Handlers. Invited tutorial paper

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  • Effects in Bayesian inference

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  • Stan: A Probabilistic Programming Language

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  • TensorFlow Distributions

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    Joshua V Dillon, Ian Langmore, Dustin Tran, Eugene Brevdo, Srinivas Vasudevan, Dave Moore, Brian Patton, Alex Alemi, Matt Hoffman, and Rif A Saurous. 2017 · 2017

    Cited alongside, same era.

Then

  • Automatic differentiation variational inference

    Alp Kucukelbir, Dustin Tran, Rajesh Ranganath, Andrew Gelman, and David M Blei. 2017 · 2017

    Later among the works it cites.

  • Pyro: A deep probabilistic programming language

    Uber AI Labs. 2017 · 2017

    Later among the works it cites.

  • Autoconj: Recognizing and Exploiting Conjugacy Without a Domain-Specific Language. In Submitted to Neural Information Processing Systems

    Matthew D. Hoffman, Matthew Johnson, and Dustin Tran. 2018 · 2018

    Closest in time.

  • Edward2: Simple, Distributed, Accelerated

    Dustin Tran, Matthew D. Hoffman, Srinivas Vasudevan, Christopher Suter, Dave Moore, Alexey Radul, Matthew Johnson, and Rif A. Saurous. 2018 · 2018

    Closest in time.

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