Margin-based Decomposed Amortized Inference

Given that structured output prediction is typically performed over entire datasets, one natural question is whether it is possible to re-use computation from earlier inference instances to speed up inference for future instances. Amortized inference has been proposed as a way to accomplish this. In this paper, first, we introduce a new amortized inference algorithm called the Margin-based Amortized Inference, which uses the notion of structured margin to identify inference problems for which previous solutions are provably optimal. Second, we introduce decomposed amortized inference, which is designed to address very large inference problems, where earlier amortization methods become less effective. This approach works by decomposing the output structure and applying amortization piece-wise, thus increasing the chance that we can re-use previous solutions for parts of the output structure. These parts are then combined to a global coherent solution using Lagrangian relaxation. In our experiments, using the NLP tasks of semantic role labeling and entityrelation extraction, we demonstrate that with the margin-based algorithm, we need to call the inference engine only for a third of the test examples. Further, we show that the decomposed variant of margin-based amortized inference achieves a greater reduction in the number of inference calls.