{"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/streamlining-variational-inference-for","title":"Streamlining Variational Inference for Constraint Satisfaction Problems","arxiv_id":"1811.09813","date":"2018-11-24","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2018 12","authors":["Aditya Grover","Tudor Achim","Stefano Ermon"],"abstract":"Several algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems are based on\nsurvey propagation, a variational inference scheme used to obtain approximate\nmarginal probability estimates for variable assignments. These marginals\ncorrespond to how frequently each variable is set to true among satisfying\nassignments, and are used to inform branching decisions during search; however,\nmarginal estimates obtained via survey propagation are approximate and can be\nself-contradictory. We introduce a more general branching strategy based on\nstreamlining constraints, which sidestep hard assignments to variables. We show\nthat streamlined solvers consistently outperform decimation-based solvers on\nrandom k-SAT instances for several problem sizes, shrinking the gap between\nempirical performance and theoretical limits of satisfiability by 16.3% on\naverage for k=3,4,5,6.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.09813v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.09813v1.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":"streamlining-variational-inference-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/ermongroup/streamline-vi-csp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"},{"task_slug":"variational-inference","task_name":"Variational Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}