Turing.jl: Add L-BFGS to Turing

[yebai]

The Optim.jl package provides an implementation of BFGS, perhaps we can integrate it with Turing?

[xukai92]

Note: link for LBFGS in Optim.jl - http://julianlsolvers.github.io/Optim.jl/stable/algo/lbfgs/

[emilemathieu]

In what context shall L-BFGS (a memory efficient quasi-Newton method) be added to Turing ? Is Turing now supporting some sort of optimisation paradigm ?

[yebai]

The Flux.jl package has implementations for several popular optimisation algorithms in ML. Perhaps we can consider to re-use them in Turing:

http://fluxml.ai/Flux.jl/stable/training/optimisers.html

@xukai92 @ChrisRackauckas

[ChrisRackauckas]

I believe it just added some higher order methods too @mikeinnes

[willtebbutt]

I completely agree with @yebai that we should try to make use of Flux's optimisers. This is perhaps a useful conversation to have at JuliaCon. It's not clear to me whether making this work would simply be a case of using a Turing.jl VarInfo to construct a Flux.jl param, and then adding a couple of methods to make stuff work with the new optimiser interface, or whether it will be a bit trickier for some reason.

[xukai92]

The new interface seems to be compatible with what Turing.jl's internals can provide. Though until they adapt a generic AD I would assume their grad may have problem with Distributions?

[MikeInnes]

We don't currently have any gradient definitions for Distributions, but they are easy to add and we'd be very happy to have them in Flux. Let me know if you have any trouble getting that set up; I'll also be around at JuliaCon and would be happy to meet up over this stuff.

[willtebbutt]

I'll also be around at JuliaCon and would be happy to meet up over this stuff.

This would be very helpful.

[yebai]

We don't currently have any gradient definitions for Distributions, but they are easy to add and we'd be very happy to have them in Flux. Let me know if you have any trouble getting that set up; I'll also be around at JuliaCon and would be happy to meet up over this stuff.

I agree with @willtebbutt and @MikeInnes that we should talk at JuliaCon. Turing and Flux together can offer a much stronger support for ML: while Flux focuses more on Neural Networks (NN) models and optimisation based learning, Turing focuses more on Probabilistic Machine Learning (PML) and Bayesian inference.

In particular, I think it would be nice if Turing and Flux can

• share AD and optimisation procedures
• share GPU and parallel computing libraries
• have compatible syntax for model and inference compositions
• have example models that combine NN/DL and Bayesian Inference

[yebai]

Closed in favour of https://github.com/TuringLang/Turing.jl/issues/605