Uniformly reweighted belief propagation: A factor graph approach

Tree-reweighted belief propagation is a message passing method that has certain advantages compared to traditional belief propagation (BP). However, it fails to outperform BP in a consistent manner, does not lend itself well to distributed implementation, and has not been applied to distributions with higher-order interactions. We propose a method called uniformly-reweighted belief propagation that mitigates these drawbacks. After having shown in previous works that this method can sub-stantially outperform BP in distributed inference with pairwise interaction models, in this paper we extend it to higher-order interactions and apply it to LDPC decoding, leading performance gains over BP.