Title: Learning Probabilistic Programs Using Backpropagation,
Abstract: Probabilistic modeling enables combining domain knowledge with learning from
data, thereby supporting learning from fewer training instances than purely
data-driven methods. However, learning probabilistic models is difficult and
has not achieved the level of performance of methods such as deep neural
networks on many tasks. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by
presenting a method for learning the parameters of a probabilistic program
using backpropagation. Our approach opens the possibility to building deep
probabilistic programming models that are trained in a similar way to neural
networks.