Edward2 vs pyro

1

Hi,

I’m a new user to Edward(2), coming from Pytorch and Pyro and I wanted to see what Edward2 could bring. I noticed that the edward2 paper came out and the tracing mechanism seems pretty identical to pyro’s tracing mechanism so I had a few questions:

  • what are the differences and tradeoffs?
  • why did you guys not cite the Pyro paper or mention the tool by name at all in your paper? is it just politics or something else?
  • are there differences in the future plans for each language?

Regards,

2

You might be interested in this abstract by Dave Moore and Maria Gorinova ([1811.06150] Effect Handling for Composable Program Transformations in Edward2). The TLDR is that tracing / effect handling is the same in Edward2, Pyro, and many PPLs. (We also note in the Edward2 paper that tracing is not a novel idea at all.) However, there are subtle differences in the implementation and that leads to interesting questions of the type of program transformations and effect-handling manipulations you can do.

  • why did you guys not cite the Pyro paper or mention the tool by name at all in your paper? is it just politics or something else?

Oversight on my part. Didn’t know it was released! The next arXiv version is replacing the Pyro library citation with the paper citation.

3

It would be great if we can somehow use all Edward2 functionalities in PyTorch as well.