Verbalized Particle Posterior: Bayesian Inference over Natural Language Hypotheses

arXiv:2607.22961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verbalized Machine Learning (VML) parameterizes a model as a natural-language prompt that an LLM evaluates as f(x; theta). The framework is interpretable, but it commits to a single hypothesis with no measure of uncertainty, and that hypothesis varies substantially across optimization runs on the same data. We propose the Verbalized Particle Posterior (VPP), which treats verbalized learning as a Bayesian inference problem: maintain a population of natural-language hypotheses as particles, update them with Metropolis-Hastings (VPP-MH) or Sequential Monte Carlo (VPP-SMC), and predict by Bayesian model averaging. Both algorithms treat the LLM as a black box, requiring no access to logits or gradients. A distinctive consequence follows. In classical Bayesian learning, model selection sits outside the posterior; in VPP both model structure and parameters share a single language space, and the posterior ranges over both. We evaluate VPP on regression, classification, and rule-discovery benchmarks. It improves over a single VML run on every benchmark and matches or exceeds an oracle-best ensemble of independent VML runs on most, while eliminating the catastrophic single-run failures that VML occasionally produces. Because each particle is a human-readable hypothesis, the posterior is itself something a reader can inspect, seeing in plain text which explanations the data supported and which it ruled out.

Abstract:Verbalized Machine Learning (VML) parameterizes a model as a natural-language prompt that an LLM evaluates as f(x; theta). The framework is interpretable, but it commits to a single hypothesis with no measure of uncertainty, and that hypothesis varies substantially across optimization runs on the same data. We propose the Verbalized Particle Posterior (VPP), which treats verbalized learning as a Bayesian inference problem: maintain a population of natural-language hypotheses as particles, update them with Metropolis-Hastings (VPP-MH) or Sequential Monte Carlo (VPP-SMC), and predict by Bayesian model averaging. Both algorithms treat the LLM as a black box, requiring no access to logits or gradients. A distinctive consequence follows. In classical Bayesian learning, model selection sits outside the posterior; in VPP both model structure and parameters share a single language space, and the posterior ranges over both. We evaluate VPP on regression, classification, and rule-discovery benchmarks. It improves over a single VML run on every benchmark and matches or exceeds an oracle-best ensemble of independent VML runs on most, while eliminating the catastrophic single-run failures that VML occasionally produces. Because each particle is a human-readable hypothesis, the posterior is itself something a reader can inspect, seeing in plain text which explanations the data supported and which it ruled out.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.22961 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2607.22961v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.22961 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Verbalized Particle Posterior: Bayesian Inference over Natural Language Hypotheses

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