Bayesian program synthesis

Last week, I—along with Jean-Michel Marin—got an email from a journalist working for Science & Vie, a French sciences journal that published a few years ago a special issue on Bayes’ theorem. (With the insane title of “the formula that deciphers the World!”) The reason for this call was the preparation of a paper on Gamalon, a new AI company that relies on (Bayesian) probabilistic programming to devise predictive tools. And spent an hour skyping with him about Bayesian inference, probabilistic programming and machine-learning, at the general level since we had not heard previously of this company or of its central tool.

“the Gamalon BPS system learns from only a few examples, not millions. It can learn using a tablet processor, not hundreds of servers. It learns right away while we play with it, not over weeks or months. And it learns from just one person, not from thousands.”

Gamalon claims to do much better than deep learning at those tasks. Not that I have reasons to doubt that claim, quite the opposite, an obvious reason being that incorporating rules and probabilistic models in the predictor is going to help if these rule and models are even moderately realistic, another major one being that handling uncertainty and learning by Bayesian tools is usually a good idea (!), and yet another significant one being that David Blei is a member of their advisory committee. But it is hard to get a feeling for such claims when the only element in the open is the use of probabilistic programming, which is an advanced and efficient manner of conducting model building and updating and handling (posterior) distributions as objects, but which does not enjoy higher predictives abilities by default. Unless I live with a restricted definition of what probabilistic programming stands for! In any case, the video provided by Gamalon and the presentation given by its CEO do not help in my understanding of the principles behind this massive gain in efficiency. Which makes sense given that the company would not want to give up their edge on the competition.

Incidentally, the video in this presentation comparing the predictive abilities of the four major astronomical explanations of the solar system is great. If not particularly connected with the difference between deep learning and Bayesian probabilistic programming.