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Debora Sujono

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3 papers

1 author row

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Marginalized Stochastic Natural Gradients for Black-Box Variational Inference

Geng Ji 0001
Debora Sujono
Erik B. Sudderth

Black-box variational inference algorithms use stochastic sampling to analyze diverse statistical models, like those expressed in probabilistic programming languages, without model-specific derivations. While the popular score-function estimator computes unbiased gradient estimates, its variance is often unacceptably large, especially in models with discrete latent variables. We propose a stochastic natural gradient estimator that is as broadly applicable and unbiased, but improves efficiency by exploiting the curvature of the variational bound, and provably reduces variance by marginalizing discrete latent variables. Our marginalized stochastic natural gradients have intriguing connections to classic coordinate ascent variational inference, but allow parallel updates of variational parameters, and provide superior convergence guarantees relative to naive Monte Carlo approximations. We integrate our method with the probabilistic programming language Pyro and evaluate real-world models of documents, images, networks, and crowd-sourcing. Compared to score-function estimators, we require far fewer Monte Carlo samples and consistently convergence orders of magnitude faster.

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Learning in Integer Latent Variable Models with Nested Automatic Differentiation

Daniel Sheldon
Kevin Winner
Debora Sujono

We develop nested automatic differentiation (AD) algorithms for exact inference and learning in integer latent variable models. Recently, Winner, Sujono, and Sheldon showed how to reduce marginalization in a class of integer latent variable models to evaluating a probability generating function which contains many levels of nested high-order derivatives. We contribute faster and more stable AD algorithms for this challenging problem and a novel algorithm to compute exact gradients for learning. These contributions lead to significantly faster and more accurate learning algorithms, and are the first AD algorithms whose running time is polynomial in the number of levels of nesting.

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ICML Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Exact Inference for Integer Latent-Variable Models

Kevin Winner
Debora Sujono
Daniel Sheldon

Graphical models with latent count variables arise in a number of areas. However, standard inference algorithms do not apply to these models due to the infinite support of the latent variables. Winner and Sheldon (2016) recently developed a new technique using probability generating functions (PGFs) to perform efficient, exact inference for certain Poisson latent variable models. However, the method relies on symbolic manipulation of PGFs, and it is unclear whether this can be extended to more general models. In this paper we introduce a new approach for inference with PGFs: instead of manipulating PGFs symbolically, we adapt techniques from the autodiff literature to compute the higher-order derivatives necessary for inference. This substantially generalizes the class of models for which efficient, exact inference algorithms are available. Specifically, our results apply to a class of models that includes branching processes, which are widely used in applied mathematics and population ecology, and autoregressive models for integer data. Experiments show that our techniques are more scalable than existing approximate methods and enable new applications.

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