We address the problem of scaling up local-search or sampling-based inference in Markov logic networks (MLNs) that have large shared sub-structures but no (or few) tied weights. Such untied MLNs are ubiquitous in practical applications. However, they have very few symmetries, and as a result lifted inference algorithms--the dominant approach for scaling up inference--perform poorly on them. The key idea in our approach is to reduce the hard, time-consuming sub-task in sampling algorithms, computing the sum of weights of features that satisfy a full assignment, to the problem of computing a set of partition functions of graphical models, each defined over the logical variables in a first-order formula. The importance of this reduction is that when the treewidth of all the graphical models is small, it yields an order of magnitude speedup. When the treewidth is large, we propose an over-symmetric approximation and experimentally demonstrate that it is both fast and accurate.
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Lifted Hinge-Loss Markov Random Fields
Statistical relational learning models are powerful tools that combine ideas from first-order logic with probabilistic graphical models to represent complex dependencies. Despite their success in encoding large problems with a compact set of weighted rules, performing inference over these models is often challenging. In this paper, we show how to effectively combine two powerful ideas for scaling inference for large graphical models. The first idea, lifted inference, is a wellstudied approach to speeding up inference in graphical models by exploiting symmetries in the underlying problem. The second idea is to frame Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference as a convex optimization problem and use alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the problem in parallel. A well-studied relaxation to the combinatorial optimization problem defined for logical Markov random fields gives rise to a hinge-loss Markov random field (HLMRF) for which MAP inference is a convex optimization problem. We show how the formalism introduced for coloring weighted bipartite graphs using a color refinement algorithm can be integrated with the ADMM optimization technique to take advantage of the sparse dependency structures of HLMRFs. Our proposed approach, lifted hinge-loss Markov random fields (LHL-MRFs), preserves the structure of the original problem after lifting and solves lifted inference as distributed convex optimization with ADMM. In our empirical evaluation on real-world problems, we observe up to a three times speed up in inference over HL-MRFs.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10110916
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 33
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7975 to 7983
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33017975
