Related papers: Exact MAP inference in general higher-order graphi…

We study the Maximum Weight Matching (MWM) problem for general graphs through the max-product Belief Propagation (BP) and related Linear Programming (LP). The BP approach provides distributed heuristics for finding the Maximum A Posteriori…

Many Bayesian statistical inference problems come down to computing a maximum a-posteriori (MAP) assignment of latent variables. Yet, standard methods for estimating the MAP assignment do not have a finite time guarantee that the algorithm…

Approximate algorithms for structured prediction problems---such as LP relaxations and the popular alpha-expansion algorithm (Boykov et al. 2001)---typically far exceed their theoretical performance guarantees on real-world instances. These…

Probabilistic inference in pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs), i.e. computing the partition function or computing a MAP estimate of the variables, is a foundational problem in probabilistic graphical models. Semidefinite programming…

Computing the conditional mode of a distribution, better known as the $\mathit{maximum\ a\ posteriori}$ (MAP) assignment, is a fundamental task in probabilistic inference. However, MAP estimation is generally intractable, and remains hard…

Finding the most probable assignment (MAP) in a general graphical model is known to be NP hard but good approximations have been attained with max-product belief propagation (BP) and its variants. In particular, it is known that using BP on…

In many safety-critical settings, probabilistic ML systems have to make predictions subject to algebraic constraints, e.g., predicting the most likely trajectory that does not cross obstacles. These real-world constraints are rarely convex,…

Marginal MAP inference involves making MAP predictions in systems defined with latent variables or missing information. It is significantly more difficult than pure marginalization and MAP tasks, for which a large class of efficient and…

Dual decomposition provides a tractable framework for designing algorithms for finding the most probable (MAP) configuration in graphical models. However, for many real-world inference problems, the typical decomposition has a large…

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…

The marginal maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation problem, which calculates the mode of the marginal posterior distribution of a subset of variables with the remaining variables marginalized, is an important inference problem…

Markov random fields (MRFs) are a powerful tool for modelling statistical dependencies for a set of random variables using a graphical representation. An important computational problem related to MRFs, called maximum a posteriori (MAP)…

The Method of Alternating Projections (MAP), a classical algorithm for solving feasibility prob- lems, has recently been intensely studied for nonconvex sets. However, intrinsically available are only local convergence results: convergence…

The Mapper algorithm is an essential tool for visualizing complex, high dimensional data in topology data analysis (TDA) and has been widely used in biomedical research. It outputs a combinatorial graph whose structure implies the shape of…

In this paper, we propose novel algorithms for inferring the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) solution of discrete pairwise random field models under multiple constraints. We show how this constrained discrete optimization problem can be…

We generalize the reduction mechanism for linear programming problems and semidefinite programming problems from [arXiv:1410.8816] in two ways 1) relaxing the requirement of affineness and 2) extending to fractional optimization problems.…

We prove that the $\alpha$-expansion algorithm for MAP inference always returns a globally optimal assignment for Markov Random Fields with Potts pairwise potentials, with a catch: the returned assignment is only guaranteed to be optimal…

We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…

It is well-known that by adding integrality constraints to the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the max-cut problem, the resulting integer semidefinite program is an exact formulation of the problem. In this paper we show…

The importance of aggregated count data, which is calculated from the data of multiple individuals, continues to increase. Collective Graphical Model (CGM) is a probabilistic approach to the analysis of aggregated data. One of the most…