English

Variational Inference on the Boolean Hypercube with the Quantum Entropy

Information Theory 2025-02-17 v2 Machine Learning math.IT Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we derive variational inference upper-bounds on the log-partition function of pairwise Markov random fields on the Boolean hypercube, based on quantum relaxations of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We then propose an efficient algorithm to compute these bounds based on primal-dual optimization. An improvement of these bounds through the use of ''hierarchies,'' similar to sum-of-squares (SoS) hierarchies is proposed, and we present a greedy algorithm to select among these relaxations. We carry extensive numerical experiments and compare with state-of-the-art methods for this inference problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.03759,
  title  = {Variational Inference on the Boolean Hypercube with the Quantum Entropy},
  author = {Eliot Beyler and Francis Bach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.03759},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:49:54.996Z