Generalization of graph network inferences in higher-order probabilistic graphical models

Probabilistic graphical models provide a powerful tool to describe complex statistical structure, with many real-world applications in science and engineering from controlling robotic arms to understanding neuronal computations. A major challenge for these graphical models is that inferences such as marginalization are intractable for general graphs. These inferences are often approximated by a distributed message-passing algorithm such as Belief Propagation, which does not always perform well on graphs with cycles, nor can it always be easily specified for complex continuous probability distributions. Such difficulties arise frequently in expressive graphical models that include intractable higher-order interactions. In this paper we construct iterative message-passing algorithms using Graph Neural Networks defined on factor graphs to achieve fast approximate inference on graphical models that involve many-variable interactions. Experimental results on several families of graphical models demonstrate the out-of-distribution generalization capability of our method to different sized graphs, and indicate the domain in which our method gains advantage over Belief Propagation.