A Concise Function Representation for Faster Exact MPE and Constrained Optimisation in Graphical Models

We propose a novel concise function representation for graphical models, a central theoretical framework that provides the basis for many reasoning tasks. We then show how we exploit our concise representation based on deterministic finite state automata within Bucket Elimination (BE), a general approach based on the concept of variable elimination that can be used to solve many inference and optimisation tasks, such as most probable explanation and constrained optimisation. We denote our version of BE as FABE. By using our concise representation within FABE, we dramatically improve the performance of BE in terms of runtime and memory requirements. Results achieved by comparing FABE with state of the art approaches for most probable explanation (i.e., recursive best-first and structured message passing) and constrained optimisation (i.e., CPLEX, GUROBI, and toulbar2) following an established methodology confirm the efficacy of our concise function representation, showing runtime improvements of up to 5 orders of magnitude in our tests.