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Title: Efficient Bayesian Inference for Nested Simulators

Paper content:
We introduce two approaches for conducting efficient Bayesian inference in stochastic simulators containing nested stochastic sub-procedures, i.e., internal procedures for which the density cannot be calculated directly such as rejection sampling loops.
The resulting class of simulators are used extensively throughout the sciences and can be interpreted as probabilistic generative models.
However, drawing inferences from them poses a substantial challenge due to the inability to evaluate even their unnormalised density, preventing the use of many standard inference procedures like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).
To address this, we introduce inference algorithms based on a two-step approach that first approximates the conditional densities of the individual sub-procedures, before using these approximations to run MCMC methods on the full program.
Because the sub-procedures can be dealt with separately and are lower-dimensional than that of the overall problem, this two-step process allows them to be isolated and thus be tractably dealt with, without placing restrictions on the overall dimensionality of the problem.
We demonstrate the utility of our approach on a simple, artificially constructed simulator.
Stochastic simulators are used in a myriad of scientific and industrial settings, such as epidemiology (Patlolla et al., 2004) , physics (Heermann, 1990) , engineering (Hangos and Cameron, 2001 ) and climate modelling (Held, 2005) .
They can be complex and highdimensional, often incorporating domain-specific expertise accumulated over many years of research and development.
As shown by the probabilistic programming (Gordon et al., 2014; van de Meent et al., 2018; and approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) (Csilléry et al., 2010; Marin et al., 2012) literatures, these simulators can be interpreted as probabilistic generative models, implicitly defining a probability distribution over their internal variables and outputs.
As such, they form valid targets for drawing Bayesian inferences.
In particular, by constraining selected internal variables or outputs to take on specific values, we implicitly define a conditional distribution, or posterior, over the remaining variables.
This effectively allows us, amongst other things, to run the simulator in "reverse", fixing the outputs to some observed values and figuring out what parameter values might have led to them.
For example, given a simulator for visual scenes, we can run inference on the simulator with an observed image to predict what objects are present in the scene (Kulkarni et al., 2015) .
Though recent advances in probabilistic programming systems (PPSs, Tran et al. (2017) ; Bingham et al. (2019) ; ; Casado et al. (2017) ) have provided convenient mechanisms for encoding, reasoning about, and constructing inference algorithms for such simulators, performing the necessary inference is still often extremely challenging, particularly for complex or high-dimensional problems.
In this paper, we consider a scenario where this inference is particularly challenging to perform: when the simulator makes calls to nested stochastic sub-procedures (NSSPs).
These NSSPs can take several different forms, such as internal rejection sampling loops, separate inference procedures, external sub-simulators we have no control over, or even realworld experiments.
Their unifying common feature is that the density of their outputs cannot be evaluated up to an input-independent normalising constant in closed form.
This, in turn, means the normalised density of the overall simulator cannot be evaluated, preventing one from using most common inference methods, including almost all Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational methods.
Though some inference methods can still be applied in these scenarios, such as nested importance sampling (Rainforth, 2018) , these tend to scale very poorly in the dimensionality and often even have fundamentally slower convergence rates than standard Monte Carlo approaches (Rainforth et al., 2018) .
To address this issue, we introduce two new approaches for performing inference in such models.
Both are based around approximating the individual NSSPs.
The first approach directly approximates the conditional density of the NSSP outputs using an amortized inference artefact.
This then forms a surrogate density for the NSSP, which, once trained, is used to replace it.
While this first approach is generally applicable, our second approach focuses on the specific case where the unnormalized density of the NSSP can be evaluated in isolation (such as a nested probabilistic program or rejection sampling loop), but its normalizing constant depends on the NSSP inputs.
Here, we train a regressor to approximate the normalising constant of the NSSP as a function of its inputs.
Once learnt, this allows the NSSP to be collapsed into the outer program: the ratio of the known unnormalised density and the approximated normalizing constant can be directly used as a factor in the overall density.
Both approaches lead to an approximate version of the overall unnormalised density, which can then be used as a target for conventional inference methods like MCMC and variational inference.
Because these approximations can be calculated separately for each NSSP, this allows them to scale to higher dimensional overall simulators far more gracefully than existing approaches, opening the door to tractably running inference for more complex problems.
Furthermore, once trained, the approximations can be reused for different datasets and configurations of the outer simulator, thereby helping amortise the cost of running multiple different inferences for no extra cost.
The approaches themselves are also amenable to automation, making them suitable candidates for PPS inference engines.

assistant: text: We introduce two approaches for efficient and scalable inference in stochastic simulators for which the density cannot be evaluated directly due to, for example, rejection sampling loops.