878 research outputs found
Maximum Weight Matching via Max-Product Belief Propagation
Max-product "belief propagation" is an iterative, local, message-passing
algorithm for finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment of a discrete
probability distribution specified by a graphical model. Despite the
spectacular success of the algorithm in many application areas such as
iterative decoding, computer vision and combinatorial optimization which
involve graphs with many cycles, theoretical results about both correctness and
convergence of the algorithm are known in few cases (Weiss-Freeman Wainwright,
Yeddidia-Weiss-Freeman, Richardson-Urbanke}.
In this paper we consider the problem of finding the Maximum Weight Matching
(MWM) in a weighted complete bipartite graph. We define a probability
distribution on the bipartite graph whose MAP assignment corresponds to the
MWM. We use the max-product algorithm for finding the MAP of this distribution
or equivalently, the MWM on the bipartite graph. Even though the underlying
bipartite graph has many short cycles, we find that surprisingly, the
max-product algorithm always converges to the correct MAP assignment as long as
the MAP assignment is unique. We provide a bound on the number of iterations
required by the algorithm and evaluate the computational cost of the algorithm.
We find that for a graph of size , the computational cost of the algorithm
scales as , which is the same as the computational cost of the best
known algorithm. Finally, we establish the precise relation between the
max-product algorithm and the celebrated {\em auction} algorithm proposed by
Bertsekas. This suggests possible connections between dual algorithm and
max-product algorithm for discrete optimization problems.Comment: In the proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on
Information Theor
An FPTAS for Bargaining Networks with Unequal Bargaining Powers
Bargaining networks model social or economic situations in which agents seek
to form the most lucrative partnership with another agent from among several
alternatives. There has been a flurry of recent research studying Nash
bargaining solutions (also called 'balanced outcomes') in bargaining networks,
so that we now know when such solutions exist, and also that they can be
computed efficiently, even by market agents behaving in a natural manner. In
this work we study a generalization of Nash bargaining, that models the
possibility of unequal 'bargaining powers'. This generalization was introduced
in [KB+10], where it was shown that the corresponding 'unequal division' (UD)
solutions exist if and only if Nash bargaining solutions exist, and also that a
certain local dynamics converges to UD solutions when they exist. However, the
bound on convergence time obtained for that dynamics was exponential in network
size for the unequal division case. This bound is tight, in the sense that
there exists instances on which the dynamics of [KB+10] converges only after
exponential time. Other approaches, such as the one of Kleinberg and Tardos, do
not generalize to the unsymmetrical case. Thus, the question of computational
tractability of UD solutions has remained open. In this paper, we provide an
FPTAS for the computation of UD solutions, when such solutions exist. On a
graph G=(V,E) with weights (i.e. pairwise profit opportunities) uniformly
bounded above by 1, our FPTAS finds an \eps-UD solution in time
poly(|V|,1/\eps). We also provide a fast local algorithm for finding \eps-UD
solution, providing further justification that a market can find such a
solution.Comment: 18 pages; Amin Saberi (Ed.): Internet and Network Economics - 6th
International Workshop, WINE 2010, Stanford, CA, USA, December 13-17, 2010.
Proceedings
Multimodal Network Alignment
A multimodal network encodes relationships between the same set of nodes in
multiple settings, and network alignment is a powerful tool for transferring
information and insight between a pair of networks. We propose a method for
multimodal network alignment that computes a matrix which indicates the
alignment, but produces the result as a low-rank factorization directly. We
then propose new methods to compute approximate maximum weight matchings of
low-rank matrices to produce an alignment. We evaluate our approach by applying
it on synthetic networks and use it to de-anonymize a multimodal transportation
network.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, Siam Data Mining 201
The cavity approach for Steiner trees packing problems
The Belief Propagation approximation, or cavity method, has been recently
applied to several combinatorial optimization problems in its zero-temperature
implementation, the max-sum algorithm. In particular, recent developments to
solve the edge-disjoint paths problem and the prize-collecting Steiner tree
problem on graphs have shown remarkable results for several classes of graphs
and for benchmark instances. Here we propose a generalization of these
techniques for two variants of the Steiner trees packing problem where multiple
"interacting" trees have to be sought within a given graph. Depending on the
interaction among trees we distinguish the vertex-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where trees cannot share nodes, from the edge-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where edges cannot be shared by trees but nodes can be members of
multiple trees. Several practical problems of huge interest in network design
can be mapped into these two variants, for instance, the physical design of
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips. The formalism described here relies
on two components edge-variables that allows us to formulate a massage-passing
algorithm for the V-DStP and two algorithms for the E-DStP differing in the
scaling of the computational time with respect to some relevant parameters. We
will show that one of the two formalisms used for the edge-disjoint variant
allow us to map the max-sum update equations into a weighted maximum matching
problem over proper bipartite graphs. We developed a heuristic procedure based
on the max-sum equations that shows excellent performance in synthetic networks
(in particular outperforming standard multi-step greedy procedures by large
margins) and on large benchmark instances of VLSI for which the optimal
solution is known, on which the algorithm found the optimum in two cases and
the gap to optimality was never larger than 4 %
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
Belief propagation : an asymptotically optimal algorithm for the random assignment problem
The random assignment problem asks for the minimum-cost perfect matching in
the complete bipartite graph \Knn with i.i.d. edge weights, say
uniform on . In a remarkable work by Aldous (2001), the optimal cost was
shown to converge to as , as conjectured by M\'ezard and
Parisi (1987) through the so-called cavity method. The latter also suggested a
non-rigorous decentralized strategy for finding the optimum, which turned out
to be an instance of the Belief Propagation (BP) heuristic discussed by Pearl
(1987). In this paper we use the objective method to analyze the performance of
BP as the size of the underlying graph becomes large. Specifically, we
establish that the dynamic of BP on \Knn converges in distribution as
to an appropriately defined dynamic on the Poisson Weighted
Infinite Tree, and we then prove correlation decay for this limiting dynamic.
As a consequence, we obtain that BP finds an asymptotically correct assignment
in time only. This contrasts with both the worst-case upper bound for
convergence of BP derived by Bayati, Shah and Sharma (2005) and the best-known
computational cost of achieved by Edmonds and Karp's algorithm
(1972).Comment: Mathematics of Operations Research (2009
Factor Graph Neural Networks
In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs),
most of which can learn powerful representations in an end-to-end fashion with
great success in many real-world applications. They have resemblance to
Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs), but break free from some limitations of
PGMs. By aiming to provide expressive methods for representation learning
instead of computing marginals or most likely configurations, GNNs provide
flexibility in the choice of information flowing rules while maintaining good
performance. Despite their success and inspirations, they lack efficient ways
to represent and learn higher-order relations among variables/nodes. More
expressive higher-order GNNs which operate on k-tuples of nodes need increased
computational resources in order to process higher-order tensors. We propose
Factor Graph Neural Networks (FGNNs) to effectively capture higher-order
relations for inference and learning. To do so, we first derive an efficient
approximate Sum-Product loopy belief propagation inference algorithm for
discrete higher-order PGMs. We then neuralize the novel message passing scheme
into a Factor Graph Neural Network (FGNN) module by allowing richer
representations of the message update rules; this facilitates both efficient
inference and powerful end-to-end learning. We further show that with a
suitable choice of message aggregation operators, our FGNN is also able to
represent Max-Product belief propagation, providing a single family of
architecture that can represent both Max and Sum-Product loopy belief
propagation. Our extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic as well as real
datasets demonstrates the potential of the proposed model.Comment: Accepted by JML
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