Taxonomy of Dual Block-Coordinate Ascent Methods for Discrete Energy Minimization

Abstract

We consider the maximum-a-posteriori inference problem in discrete graphical models and study solvers based on the dual block-coordinate ascent rule. We map all existing solvers in a single framework, allowing for a better understanding of their design principles. We theoretically show that some block-optimizing updates are sub-optimal and how to strictly improve them. On a wide range of problem instances of varying graph connectivity, we study the performance of existingsolvers as well as new variants that can be obtained within the framework. As a result of this exploration we build a new state-of-the art solver, performing uniformly better on the whole range of test instances.

Cite

Text

Tourani et al. "Taxonomy of Dual Block-Coordinate Ascent Methods for Discrete Energy Minimization." Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2020.

Markdown

[Tourani et al. "Taxonomy of Dual Block-Coordinate Ascent Methods for Discrete Energy Minimization." Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2020.](https://mlanthology.org/aistats/2020/tourani2020aistats-taxonomy/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{tourani2020aistats-taxonomy,
  title     = {{Taxonomy of Dual Block-Coordinate Ascent Methods for Discrete Energy Minimization}},
  author    = {Tourani, Siddharth and Shekhovtsov, Alexander and Rother, Carsten and Savchynskyy, Bogdan},
  booktitle = {Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  year      = {2020},
  pages     = {2775-2785},
  volume    = {108},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aistats/2020/tourani2020aistats-taxonomy/}
}