{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/amortized-bethe-free-energy-minimization-for","title":"Amortized Bethe Free Energy Minimization for Learning MRFs","arxiv_id":"1906.06399","date":"2019-06-14","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2019 12","authors":["Sam Wiseman","Yoon Kim"],"abstract":"We propose to learn deep undirected graphical models (i.e., MRFs) with a non-ELBO objective for which we can calculate exact gradients. In particular, we optimize a saddle-point objective deriving from the Bethe free energy approximation to the partition function. Unlike much recent work in approximate inference, the derived objective requires no sampling, and can be efficiently computed even for very expressive MRFs. We furthermore amortize this optimization with trained inference networks. Experimentally, we find that the proposed approach compares favorably with loopy belief propagation, but is faster, and it allows for attaining better held out log likelihood than other recent approximate inference schemes.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06399v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06399v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"amortized-bethe-free-energy-minimization-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/swiseman/bethe-min","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.06399","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}