Generalized sequential tree-reweighted message passing

Thomas Schoenemann and Vladimir Kolmogorov.

To appear in Advanced Structured Prediction, eds. Sebastian Nowozin, Peter V. Gehler, Jeremy Jancsary and Christoph Lampert, MIT Press.


Abstract

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.


Links

arXiv version (2012)
implementation by Thomas Schoenemann