Paper ID: 2411.03759

Variational Inference on the Boolean Hypercube with the Quantum Entropy

Eliot Beyler (SIERRA), Francis Bach (SIERRA)

In this paper, we derive variational inference upper-bounds on the log-partition function of pairwise Markov random fields on the Boolean hypercube, based on quantum relaxations of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We then propose an efficient algorithm to compute these bounds based on primal-dual optimization. An improvement of these bounds through the use of ''hierarchies,'' similar to sum-of-squares (SoS) hierarchies is proposed, and we present a greedy algorithm to select among these relaxations. We carry extensive numerical experiments and compare with state-of-the-art methods for this inference problem.

Submitted: Nov 6, 2024