6 research outputs found
Generalized sequential tree-reweighted message passing
This paper addresses the problem of approximate MAP-MRF inference in general
graphical models. Following [36], we consider a family of linear programming
relaxations of the problem where each relaxation is specified by a set of
nested pairs of factors for which the marginalization constraint needs to be
enforced. We develop a generalization of the TRW-S algorithm [9] for this
problem, where we use a decomposition into junction chains, monotonic w.r.t.
some ordering on the nodes. This generalizes the monotonic chains in [9] in a
natural way. We also show how to deal with nested factors in an efficient way.
Experiments show an improvement over min-sum diffusion, MPLP and subgradient
ascent algorithms on a number of computer vision and natural language
processing problems
Blending Learning and Inference in Structured Prediction
In this paper we derive an efficient algorithm to learn the parameters of
structured predictors in general graphical models. This algorithm blends the
learning and inference tasks, which results in a significant speedup over
traditional approaches, such as conditional random fields and structured
support vector machines. For this purpose we utilize the structures of the
predictors to describe a low dimensional structured prediction task which
encourages local consistencies within the different structures while learning
the parameters of the model. Convexity of the learning task provides the means
to enforce the consistencies between the different parts. The
inference-learning blending algorithm that we propose is guaranteed to converge
to the optimum of the low dimensional primal and dual programs. Unlike many of
the existing approaches, the inference-learning blending allows us to learn
efficiently high-order graphical models, over regions of any size, and very
large number of parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach,
while presenting state-of-the-art results in stereo estimation, semantic
segmentation, shape reconstruction, and indoor scene understanding
Blending Learning and Inference in Conditional Random Fields
Conditional random fields maximize the log-likelihood of training labels given the training data, e.g., objects given images. In many cases the training labels are structures that consist of a set of variables and the computational complexity for estimating their likelihood is exponential in the number of the variables. Learning algorithms relax this computational burden using approximate inference that is nested as a sub-procedure. In this paper we describe the objective function for nested learning and inference in conditional random fields. The devised objective maximizes the log-beliefs -probability distributions over subsets of training variables that agree on their marginal probabilities. This objective is concave and consists of two types of variables that are related to the learning and inference tasks respectively. Importantly, we afterwards show how to blend the learning and inference procedure and effectively get to the identical optimum much faster. The proposed algorithm currently achieves the state-of-the-art in various computer vision applications
Rounding-based Moves for Semi-Metric Labeling
International audienceSemi-metric labeling is a special case of energy minimization for pairwise Markov random fields. The energy function consists of arbitrary unary potentials, and pairwise potentials that are proportional to a given semi-metric distance function over the label set. Popular methods for solving semi-metric labeling include (i) move-making algorithms, which iteratively solve a minimum st-cut problem; and (ii) the linear programming (LP) relaxation based approach. In order to convert the fractional solution of the LP relaxation to an integer solution, several randomized rounding procedures have been developed in the literature. We consider a large class of parallel rounding procedures, and design move-making algorithms that closely mimic them. We prove that the multiplicative bound of a move-making algorithm exactly matches the approximation factor of the corresponding rounding procedure for any arbitrary distance function. Our analysis includes all known results for move-making algorithms as special cases