8,894 research outputs found
A Declarative Semantics for CLP with Qualification and Proximity
Uncertainty in Logic Programming has been investigated during the last
decades, dealing with various extensions of the classical LP paradigm and
different applications. Existing proposals rely on different approaches, such
as clause annotations based on uncertain truth values, qualification values as
a generalization of uncertain truth values, and unification based on proximity
relations. On the other hand, the CLP scheme has established itself as a
powerful extension of LP that supports efficient computation over specialized
domains while keeping a clean declarative semantics. In this paper we propose a
new scheme SQCLP designed as an extension of CLP that supports qualification
values and proximity relations. We show that several previous proposals can be
viewed as particular cases of the new scheme, obtained by partial
instantiation. We present a declarative semantics for SQCLP that is based on
observables, providing fixpoint and proof-theoretical characterizations of
least program models as well as an implementation-independent notion of goal
solutions.Comment: 17 pages, 26th Int'l. Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'10
Symbolic Exact Inference for Discrete Probabilistic Programs
The computational burden of probabilistic inference remains a hurdle for
applying probabilistic programming languages to practical problems of interest.
In this work, we provide a semantic and algorithmic foundation for efficient
exact inference on discrete-valued finite-domain imperative probabilistic
programs. We leverage and generalize efficient inference procedures for
Bayesian networks, which exploit the structure of the network to decompose the
inference task, thereby avoiding full path enumeration. To do this, we first
compile probabilistic programs to a symbolic representation. Then we adapt
techniques from the probabilistic logic programming and artificial intelligence
communities in order to perform inference on the symbolic representation. We
formalize our approach, prove it sound, and experimentally validate it against
existing exact and approximate inference techniques. We show that our inference
approach is competitive with inference procedures specialized for Bayesian
networks, thereby expanding the class of probabilistic programs that can be
practically analyzed
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