4 hours ago by Larry Hardesty Two-dimensional images of human faces (top row) and front views of three-dimensional models of the same faces, produced by both a new MIT system (middle row) and one of its predecessors (bottom row).

Most recent advances in artificial intelligencesuch as mobile apps that convert speech to textare the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns.

To make machine-learning applications easier to build, computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an incubator of cutting-edge technology, launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research.

At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June, MIT researchers will demonstrate that on some standard computer-vision tasks, short programsless than 50 lines longwritten in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code.

"This is the first time that we're introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area," says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. "The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems."

By the standards of conventional computer programs, those "models" can seem absurdly vague. One of the tasks that the researchers investigate, for instance, is constructing a 3-D model of a human face from 2-D images. Their program describes the principal features of the face as being two symmetrically distributed objects (eyes) with two more centrally positioned objects beneath them (the nose and mouth). It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language, but at that point, the model is complete. Feed the program enough examples of 2-D images and their corresponding 3-D models, and it will figure out the rest for itself.

"When you think about probabilistic programs, you think very intuitively when you're modeling," Kulkarni says. "You don't think mathematically. It's a very different style of modeling."

Joining Kulkarni on the paper are his adviser, professor of brain and cognitive sciences Josh Tenenbaum; Vikash Mansinghka, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and Pushmeet Kohli of Microsoft Research Cambridge. For their experiments, they created a probabilistic programming language they call Picture, which is an extension of Julia, another language developed at MIT.

What's old is new

The new work, Kulkarni says, revives an idea known as inverse graphics, which dates from the infancy of artificial-intelligence research. Even though their computers were painfully slow by today's standards, the artificial intelligence pioneers saw that graphics programs would soon be able to synthesize realistic images by calculating the way in which light reflected off of virtual objects. This is, essentially, how Pixar makes movies.

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Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands