SynJax: Structured Probability Distributions for JAX
Authors: name: Miloš Stanojević; name: Laurent Sartran
Published: 2023-08-07 04:20:38

Abstract: The development of deep learning software libraries enabled significant
progress in the field by allowing users to focus on modeling, while letting the
library to take care of the tedious and time-consuming task of optimizing
execution for modern hardware accelerators. However, this has benefited only
particular types of deep learning models, such as Transformers, whose
primitives map easily to the vectorized computation. The models that explicitly
account for structured objects, such as trees and segmentations, did not
benefit equally because they require custom algorithms that are difficult to
implement in a vectorized form.
  SynJax directly addresses this problem by providing an efficient vectorized
implementation of inference algorithms for structured distributions covering
alignment, tagging, segmentation, constituency trees and spanning trees. With
SynJax we can build large-scale differentiable models that explicitly model
structure in the data. The code is available at
https://github.com/deepmind/synjax.