English

Is SP BP?

Information Theory 2008-01-31 v1 math.IT

Abstract

The Survey Propagation (SP) algorithm for solving kk-SAT problems has been shown recently as an instance of the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm. In this paper, we show that for general constraint-satisfaction problems, SP may not be reducible from BP. We also establish the conditions under which such a reduction is possible. Along our development, we present a unification of the existing SP algorithms in terms of a probabilistically interpretable iterative procedure -- weighted Probabilistic Token Passing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.4571,
  title  = {Is SP BP?},
  author = {Ronghui Tu and Yongyi Mao and Jiying Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.4571},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

77 page double-spaced single-column submitted version to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:07:40.745Z