Invited Talk
in
Workshop: Advances in Programming Languages and Neurosymbolic Systems (AIPLANS)

Differential Inference: A Criminally Underused Tool. - Alexander Rush - Cornell University

Alexander Rush

2021 Invited Talk
in
Workshop: Advances in Programming Languages and Neurosymbolic Systems (AIPLANS)

Abstract

Differential Inference is the use of differentiation to perform probabilistic inference. The technique itself is relatively straightforward and plays nicely with autodiff: it roughly just automates Bayes' rule the way autodiff automates the chain rule. However, there is still a tendency for students to get tied up in the knots of even elementary probabilistic inference. Inspired by polemics that shined light on autodifferentiation, this talk will be half a tutorial on the use of differential inference and half a demonstration of all the fun math that it can remove from your life.

Speaker

Alexander Rush

Alexander "Sasha" Rush is an Associate Professor at Cornell Tech and a researcher at Hugging Face. His research interest is in the study of language models with applications in controllable text generation, efficient inference, and applications in summarization and information extraction. In addition to research, he has written several popular open-source software projects supporting NLP research, programming for deep learning, and virtual academic conferences. His projects have received paper and demo awards at major NLP, visualization, and hardware conferences, an NSF Career Award and Sloan Fellowship. He tweets at @srush_nlp.

Video

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