A compositional atlas of tractable circuit operations for probabilistic inference

Antonio Vergari, Yoo Jung Choi, Anji Liu, Stefano Teso, Guy Van den Broeck

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Circuit representations are becoming the lingua franca to express and reason about tractable generative and discriminative models. In this paper, we show how complex inference scenarios for these models that commonly arise in machine learning—from computing the expectations of decision tree ensembles to information-theoretic divergences of sum-product networks—can be represented in terms of tractable modular operations over circuits. Specifically, we characterize the tractability of simple transformations—sums, products, quotients, powers, logarithms, and exponentials—in terms of sufficient structural constraints of the circuits they operate on, and present novel hardness results for the cases in which these properties are not satisfied. Building on these operations, we derive a unified framework for reasoning about tractable models that generalizes several results in the literature and opens up novel tractable inference scenarios.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
EditorsMarc'Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann Dauphin, Percy S. Liang, Jenn Wortman Vaughan
PublisherNeural Information Processing Systems Foundation (NeurIPS)
Pages13189-13201
Number of pages13
Volume34
ISBN (Electronic)9781713845393
Publication statusPublished - 6 Dec 2021
Event35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Virtual, Online
Duration: 6 Dec 202114 Dec 2021

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
PublisherNeural Information Processing Systems Foundation (NeurIPS)
Volume34
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Abbreviated titleNeurIPS 2021
Period6/12/2114/12/21

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