Bob and Alice Go to a Bar: Reasoning About Future With Probabilistic Programs

Agent preferences should be specified stochastically rather than deterministically. Planning as inference with stochastic preferences naturally describes agent behaviors, does not require introducing rewards and exponential weighing of behaviors, and allows to reason about agents using the solid foundation of Bayesian statistics. Stochastic conditioning is the formalism behind agents with stochastic preferences.

Stochastic Probabilistic Programs

We introduce the notion of a stochastic probabilistic program and present a reference implementation of a probabilistic programming facility supporting specification of stochastic probabilistic programs and inference in them. Stochastic probabilistic programs allow straightforward specification and efficient inference in models with nuisance parameters, noise, and nondeterminism. We give several examples of stochastic probabilistic programs, and compare the programs with corresponding deterministic probabilistic programs in terms of model specification and inference. We conclude with discussion of open research topics and related work.