Belief propagation -- a powerful heuristic method to solve inference problems
involving a large number of random variables -- was recently generalized to
quantum theory. Like its classical counterpart, this algorithm is exact on
trees when the appropriate independence conditions are met and is expected to
provide reliable approximations when operated on loopy graphs. In this paper,
we benchmark the performances of loopy quantum belief propagation (QBP) in the
context of finite-tempereture quantum many-body physics. Our results indicate
that QBP provides reliable estimates of the high-temperature correlation
function when the typical loop size in the graph is large. As such, it is
suitable e.g. for the study of quantum spin glasses on Bethe lattices and the
decoding of sparse quantum error correction codes.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
