Residual belief propagation: Informed scheduling for asynchronous message passing

Gal Elidan*, Ian McGraw, Daphne Koller

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

181 Scopus citations

Abstract

Inference for probabilistic graphical models is still very much a practical challenge in large domains. The commonly used and effective belief propagation (BP) algorithm and its generalizations often do not converge when applied to hard, real-life inference tasks. While it is widely recognized that the scheduling of messages in these algorithms may have significant consequences, this issue remains largely unexplored. In this work, we address the question of how to schedule messages for asynchronous propagation so that a fixed point is reached faster and more often. We first show that any reasonable asynchronous BP converges to a unique fixed point under conditions similar to those that guarantee convergence of synchronous BP. In addition, we show that the convergence rate of a simple round-robin schedule is at least as good as that of synchronous propagation. We then propose residual belief propagation (RBP), a novel, easy-to-implement, asynchronous propagation algorithm that schedules messages in an informed way, that pushes down a bound on the distance from the fixed point. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of RBP over state-of-the-art methods for a variety of challenging synthetic and real-life problems: RBP converges significantly more often than other methods; and it significantly reduces running time until convergence, even when other methods converge.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2006
Pages165-173
Number of pages9
StatePublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2006 - Cambridge, MA, United States
Duration: 13 Jul 200616 Jul 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2006

Conference

Conference22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2006
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCambridge, MA
Period13/07/0616/07/06

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