GPU-accelerated Inference for Discrete Probabilistic Programs
Name
ghavami-mghavami-sm-eecs-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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1.09 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Ghavami, Matin
Advisor(s)
Mansinghka, Vikash
Date Issued
May 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis presents a comprehensive approach to GPU-accelerated inference for discrete probabilistic programs. We make two key contributions : (1) a factor graph IR implemented in JAX that supports variable elimination and Gibbs sampling, and (2) a modeling DSL with a compiler that lowers programs to the factor graph IR. Our system enables significant performance optimizations through static analysis of the factor graph structure. Variable elimination is optimized by reduction to tensor contraction with optimized contraction paths, while Gibbs sampling is automatically parallelized through graph coloring techniques. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate orders of magnitude performance improvements over existing systems, with the parallelized Gibbs sampler showing speed-ups of up to 144x on Bayesian networks and even greater improvements for models with regular graph topologies such as Ising models and hidden Markov models.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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