Related papers: The Complexity of Approximating a Bethe Equilibriu…
Factor graphs are important models for succinctly representing probability distributions in machine learning, coding theory, and statistical physics. Several computational problems, such as computing marginals and partition functions, arise…
The Bethe approximation, discovered in statistical physics, gives an efficient algorithm called belief propagation (BP) for approximating a partition function. BP empirically gives an accurate approximation for many problems, e.g.,…
The Bethe approximation is a well-known approximation of the partition function used in statistical physics. Recently, an equality relating the partition function and its Bethe approximation was obtained for graphical models with binary…
In this thesis, new generalizations of the Bethe approximation and new understanding of the replica method are proposed. The Bethe approximation is an efficient approximation for graphical models, which gives an asymptotically accurate…
The Bethe approximation, or loopy belief propagation algorithm is a successful method for approximating partition functions of probabilistic models associated with a graph. Chertkov and Chernyak derived an interesting formula called Loop…
We define and study an inference algorithm based on "belief propagation" (BP) and the Bethe approximation. The idea is to encode into a graph an a priori information composed of correlations or marginal probabilities of variables, and to…
When belief propagation (BP) converges, it does so to a stationary point of the Bethe free energy $F$, and is often strikingly accurate. However, it may converge only to a local optimum or may not converge at all. An algorithm was recently…
We first present an empirical study of the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm, when run on the random field Ising model defined on random regular graphs in the zero temperature limit. We introduce the notion of maximal solutions for the BP…
The random assignment problem asks for the minimum-cost perfect matching in the complete $n\times n$ bipartite graph $\Knn$ with i.i.d. edge weights, say uniform on $[0,1]$. In a remarkable work by Aldous (2001), the optimal cost was shown…
It is known that fixed points of loopy belief propagation (BP) correspond to stationary points of the Bethe variational problem, where we minimize the Bethe free energy subject to normalization and marginalization constraints.…
We describe a novel approach to statistical learning from particles tracked while moving in a random environment. The problem consists in inferring properties of the environment from recorded snapshots. We consider here the case of a fluid…
The sum-product or belief propagation (BP) algorithm is a widely-used message-passing algorithm for computing marginal distributions in graphical models with discrete variables. At the core of the BP message updates, when applied to a…
Given a locally consistent set of reduced density matrices, we construct approximate density matrices which are globally consistent with the local density matrices we started from when the trial density matrix has a tree structure. We…
We present a novel inference algorithm for arbitrary, binary, undirected graphs. Unlike loopy belief propagation, which iterates fixed point equations, we directly descend on the Bethe free energy. The algorithm consists of two phases,…
Belief Propagation is a well-studied message-passing algorithm that runs over graphical models and can be used for approximate inference and approximation of local marginals. The resulting approximations are equivalent to the Bethe-Peierls…
Belief propagation (BP) algorithm is a widely used message-passing method for inference in graphical models. BP on loop-free graphs converges in linear time. But for graphs with loops, BP's performance is uncertain, and the understanding of…
We often encounter probability distributions given as unnormalized products of non-negative functions. The factorization structures are represented by hypergraphs called factor graphs. Such distributions appear in various fields, including…
Many quantities of interest in communications, signal processing, artificial intelligence, and other areas can be expressed as the partition sum of some factor graph. Although the exact calculation of the partition sum is in many cases…
Belief Propagation (BP) is a popular, distributed heuristic for performing MAP computations in Graphical Models. BP can be interpreted, from a variational perspective, as minimizing the Bethe Free Energy (BFE). BP can also be used to solve…
It is well known that an arbitrary graphical model of statistical inference defined on a tree, i.e. on a graph without loops, is solved exactly and efficiently by an iterative Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm convergent to unique minimum…