# IBIA: An Incremental Build-Infer-Approximate Framework for Approximate Inference of Partition Function

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06366/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Expectation Propagation for approximate Bayesian inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2294/) (2013)
- [Loopy Belief Propagation for Approximate Inference: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.6725/) (2013)
- [Tractable Inference for Complex Stochastic Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.7362/) (2013)
- [A Scalable Approximate Model Counter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5726/) (2013)
- [Join-Graph Propagation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3489/) (2014)
- [Partition Function Estimation: A Quantitative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11132/) (2021)
- [Lifted Hybrid Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02773/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Jointrees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.7369/) (2013)
- [Clustering Without (Thinking About) Triangulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.4941/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Approximate inference of marginals using the IBIA framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00335/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Exact computation of the partition function is known to be intractable, necessitating approximate inference techniques. Existing methods for approximate inference are slow to converge for many benchmarks. The control of accuracy-complexity trade-off is also non-trivial in many of these methods. We propose a novel incremental build-infer-approximate (IBIA) framework for approximate inference that addresses these issues. In this framework, the probabilistic graphical model is converted into a sequence of clique tree forests (SCTF) with bounded clique sizes. We show that the SCTF can be used to efficiently compute the partition function. We propose two new algorithms which are used to construct the SCTF and prove the correctness of both. The first is an algorithm for incremental construction of CTFs that is guaranteed to give a valid CTF with bounded clique sizes and the second is an approximation algorithm that takes a calibrated CTF as input and yields a valid and calibrated CTF with reduced clique sizes as the output. We have evaluated our method using several benchmark sets from recent UAI competitions and our results show good accuracies with competitive runtimes.