Towards representation agnostic probabilistic programming

Abstract

Current probabilistic programming languages and tools tightly couple model representations with specific inference algorithms, preventing experimentation with novel representations or mixed discrete-continuous models. We introduce a factor abstraction with five fundamental operations that serve as a universal interface for manipulating factors regardless of their underlying representation. This enables representation-agnostic probabilistic programming where users can freely mix different representations (e.g. discrete tables, Gaussians distributions, sample-based approaches) within a single unified framework, allowing practical inference in complex hybrid models that current toolkits cannot adequately express.