Inference by belief propagation in composite systems

Inference by belief propagation in composite systems.

We devise a message passing algorithm for probabilistic inference in composite systems, consisting of a large number of variables, that exhibit weak random interactions among all variables and strong interactions with a small subset of randomly chosen variables; the relative strength of the two interactions is controlled by a free parameter. We examine the performance of the algorithm numerical...

Focused Belief Propagation for Query-Specific Inference

With the increasing popularity of largescale probabilistic graphical models, even “lightweight” approximate inference methods are becoming infeasible. Fortunately, often large parts of the model are of no immediate interest to the end user. Given the variable that the user actually cares about, we show how to quantify edge importance in graphical models and to significantly speed up inference b...

Optimal Inference in Crowdsourced Classification via Belief Propagation

Crowdsourcing systems are popular for solving large-scale labelling tasks with low-paid workers. We study the problem of recovering the true labels from the possibly erroneous crowdsourced labels under the popular Dawid-Skene model. To address this inference problem, several algorithms have recently been proposed, but the best known guarantee is still significantly larger than the fundamental l...

Fast Inference in Phrase Extraction Models with Belief Propagation

Modeling overlapping phrases in an alignment model can improve alignment quality but comes with a high inference cost. For example, the model of DeNero and Klein (2010) uses an ITG constraint and beam-based Viterbi decoding for tractability, but is still slow. We first show that their model can be approximated using structured belief propagation, with a gain in alignment quality stemming from t...

Generalized belief propagation for approximate inference in hybrid Bayesian networks