Related papers: The Bethe Partition Function of Log-supermodular G…
A recent result has demonstrated that the Bethe partition function always lower bounds the true partition function of binary, log-supermodular graphical models. We demonstrate that these results can be extended to other interesting classes…
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…
Bounds on the log partition function are important in a variety of contexts, including approximate inference, model fitting, decision theory, and large deviations analysis. We introduce a new class of upper bounds on the log partition…
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…
In this article, I present a conjecture on the number of independent sets on graph covers. I also show that the conjecture implies that the partition function of a binary pairwise attractive model is greater than that of the Bethe…
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 consider log-supermodular models on binary variables, which are probabilistic models with negative log-densities which are submodular. These models provide probabilistic interpretations of common combinatorial optimization tasks such as…
For various classes of graphical models it has been observed that the ratio of the partition sum to its Bethe approximation is often close to being the square of the ratio of the partition sum to its degree-2 Bethe approximation. This is of…
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…
This paper resolves a common complexity issue in the Bethe approximation of statistical physics and the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm of artificial intelligence. The Bethe approximation and the BP algorithm are heuristic methods for…
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 problem of maximizing non-negative submodular functions has been studied extensively in the last few years. However, most papers consider submodular set functions. Recently, several advances have been made for the more general case of…
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,…
We propose an approach for approximating the partition function which is based on two steps: (1) computing the partition function of a simplified model which is obtained by deleting model edges, and (2) rectifying the result by applying an…
Graphical models represent multivariate and generally not normalized probability distributions. Computing the normalization factor, called the partition function, is the main inference challenge relevant to multiple statistical and…
It has previously been an open problem whether all Boolean submodular functions can be decomposed into a sum of binary submodular functions over a possibly larger set of variables. This problem has been considered within several different…
In this thesis, we leverage finite graph covers to analyze the SPA and the Bethe partition function for both S-FGs and DE-FGs. There are two main contributions in this thesis. The first main contribution concerns a special class of S-FGs…
We introduce two graph polynomials and discuss their properties. One is a polynomial of two variables whose investigation is motivated by the performance analysis of the Bethe approximation of the Ising partition function. The other is a…
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.…
A loop series expansion for the partition function of a general statistical model on a graph is carried out. If the auxiliary probability distributions of the expansion are chosen to be a fixed point of the belief-propagation equation, the…