# Paper extending Stan language with variational inference guides and translating models to Pyro
**URL:** https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/paper-extending-stan-language-with-variational-inference-guides-and-translating-models-to-pyro/5905
**Category:** Developers
**Created:** [October 6, 2018, 7:26pm UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/paper-extending-stan-language-with-variational-inference-guides-and-translating-models-to-pyro/5905 "2018-10-06T19:26:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@avehtari](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/u/avehtari)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2018, 7:26pm UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/paper-extending-stan-language-with-variational-inference-guides-and-translating-models-to-pyro/5905/1 "2018-10-06T19:26:56Z")
Really don’t know whether this has any practical relevance, but interesting paper anyway as they show how to add guides for non-black-box variational inference using guides and they translate models to Pyro and make some performance comparisons
Extending Stan for Deep Probabilistic Programming [https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00873](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00873)
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### Author:  [@ahartikainen](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/u/ahartikainen)
#### Post date: [October 7, 2018, 6:05pm UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/paper-extending-stan-language-with-variational-inference-guides-and-translating-models-to-pyro/5905/2 "2018-10-07T18:05:44Z")
If they can do `Stan --> Pyro` could they also do `Pyro --> Stan`?
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### Author:  [@Bob\_Carpenter](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/u/Bob_Carpenter)
#### Post date: [October 22, 2018, 2:03am UTC](https://discourse.mc-stan.org/t/paper-extending-stan-language-with-variational-inference-guides-and-translating-models-to-pyro/5905/3 "2018-10-22T02:03:12Z")
From what I understand, they used our AST with a new code generator they wrote into the C++. We’re trying to make this easier with the new language design/architecture that @seantalts is designing.