Inference problems in graphical models can be represented as a constrained optimization of a free energy function. It is known that when the Bethe free energy is used, the fixedpoints of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm correspond to the local minima of the free energy. However BP fails to converge in many cases of interest. Moreover, the Bethe free energy is non-convex for graphical models with cycles thus introducing great difficulty in deriving efficient algorithms for finding local minima of the free energy for general graphs. In this paper we introduce two efficient BP-like algorithms, one sequential and the other parallel, that are guaranteed to converge to the global minimum, for any graph, over the class of energies known as ”convex free energies”. In addition, we propose an efficient heuristic for setting the parameters of the convex free energy based on the structure of the graph. 1

Inference problems in graphical models are often approximated by casting them as constrained optimization problems. Message passing algorithms, such as belief propagation, have previously been suggested as methods for solving these optimization problems. However, there are few convergence guarantees for such algorithms, and the algorithms are therefore not guaranteed to solve the corresponding optimization problem. Here we present an oriented tree decomposition algorithm that is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum of the Tree-Reweighted (TRW) variational problem. Our algorithm performs local updates in the convex dual of the TRW problem – an unconstrained generalized geometric program. Primal updates, also local, correspond to oriented reparametrization operations that leave the distribution intact. 1

We provide a brief overview of the variational framework for obtaining deterministic approximations or upper bounds for the log-partition function. We also review some of the Monte Carlo based methods for estimating partition functions of arbitrary Markov Random Fields. We then develop an annealed importance sampling (AIS) procedure for estimating partition functions of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM’s), semi-restricted Boltzmann machines (SRBM’s), and Boltzmann machines (BM’s). Our empirical results indicate that the AIS procedure provides much better estimates of the partition function than some of the popular variational-based methods. Finally, we develop a new learning algorithm for training general Boltzmann machines and show that it can be successfully applied to learning good generative models. Learning and Evaluating Boltzmann Machines

The introduction of loopy belief propagation (LBP) revitalized the application of graphical models in many domains. Many recent works present improvements on the basic LBP algorithm in an attempt to overcome convergence and local optima problems. Notable among these are convexified free energy approximations that lead to inference procedures with provable convergence and quality properties. However, empirically LBP still outperforms most of its convex variants in a variety of settings, as we also demonstrate here. Motivated by this fact we seek convexified free energies that directly approximate the Bethe free energy. We show that the proposed approximations compare favorably with state-of-the art convex free energy approximations. 1