Min-Max Propagation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)

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Authors

Christopher Srinivasa, Inmar Givoni, Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Brendan J. Frey

Abstract

We study the application of min-max propagation, a variation of belief propagation, for approximate min-max inference in factor graphs. We show that for “any” high-order function that can be minimized in O(ω), the min-max message update can be obtained using an efficient O(K(ω + log(K)) procedure, where K is the number of variables. We demonstrate how this generic procedure, in combination with efficient updates for a family of high-order constraints, enables the application of min-max propagation to efficiently approximate the NP-hard problem of makespan minimization, which seeks to distribute a set of tasks on machines, such that the worst case load is minimized.