Let @math be a uniformly distributed random @math -SAT formula with @math variables and @math clauses. We present a polynomial time algorithm that finds a satisfying assignment of @math with high probability for constraint densities @math , where @math . Previously no efficient algorithm was known to find satisfying assignments with a nonvanishing probability beyond @math [A. Frieze and S. Suen, J. Algorithms, 20 (1996), pp. 312-355].
Montanari, Ricci-Tersenghi, and Semerjian @cite_9 provide evidence that Belief Propagation guided decimation may succeed up to density @math . This algorithm is based on a very different paradigm than the others mentioned in Table . The basic idea is to run a message passing algorithm ( Belief Propagation'') to compute for each variable the marginal probability that this variable takes the value true false in a uniformly random satisfying assignment. Then, the decimation step selects a variable, assigns it the value true false with the corresponding marginal probability, and simplifies the formula. Ideally, repeating this procedure will yield a satisfying assignment, provided that Belief Propagation keeps yielding the correct marginals. Proving (or disproving) this remains a major open problem.
@cite_9
1833343854 2061302090 2054743378 2107639356
Let Φ be a uniformly distributed random k-SAT formula with n variables and m clauses. Non-constructive arguments show that Φ is satisfiable for clause variable ratios m n ≤ rk 2k ln 2 with high probability (Achlioptas, Moore: SICOMP 2006; Achlioptas, Peres: J. AMS 2004). Yet no efficient algorithm is know to find a satisfying assignment for densities as low as m n rk · ln(k) k with a non-vanishing probability. In fact, the density m n rk · ln(k) k seems to form a barrier for a broad class of local search algorithms (Achlioptas, Coja-Oghlan: FOCS 2008). On the basis of deep but non-rigorous statistical mechanics considerations, a message passing algorithm called belief propagation guided decimation for solving random k-SAT has been forward (Mezard, Parisi, Zecchina: Science 2002; Braunstein, Mezard, Zecchina: RSA 2005). Experiments suggest that the algorithm might succeed for densities very close to rk for k = 3, 4, 5 (Kroc, Sabharwal, Selman: SAC 2009). Furnishing the first rigorous analysis of belief propagation guided decimation on random k-SAT, the present paper shows that the algorithm fails to find a satisfying assignment already for m n ≥ ρ · rk k, for a constant ρ > 0 independent of k. We describe message-passing and decimation approaches for lossy source coding using low-density generator matrix (LDGM) codes. In particular, this paper addresses the problem of encoding a Bernoulli(1 2) source: for randomly generated LDGM codes with suitably irregular degree distributions, our methods yield performance very close to the rate distortion limit over a range of rates. Our approach is inspired by the survey propagation (SP) algorithm, originally developed by (2002) for solving random satisfiability problems. Previous work by (2005) shows how SP can be understood as belief propagation (BP) for an alternative representation of satisfiability problems. In analogy to this connection, our approach is to define a family of Markov random fields over generalized codewords, from which local message-passing rules can be derived in the standard way. The overall source encoding method is based on message-passing, setting a subset of bits to their preferred values (decimation), and reducing the code Decimation is a simple process for solving constraint satisfaction problems, by repeatedly fixing variable values and simplifying without reconsidering earlier decisions. We investigate different decimation strategies, contrasting those based on local, syntactic information from those based on message passing, such as statistical physics based Survey Propagation (SP) and the related and more well-known Belief Propagation (BP). Our results reveal that once we resolve convergence issues, BP itself can solve fairly hard random k-SAT formulas through decimation; the gap between BP and SP narrows down quickly as k increases. We also investigate observable differences between BP SP and other common CSP heuristics as decimation proceeds, exploring the hardness of the decimated formulas and identifying a somewhat unexpected feature of message passing heuristics, namely, unlike other heuristics for satisfiability, they avoid unit propagation as variables are fixed. In this paper, we propose a new inference algorithm, suitable for distributed processing over wireless networks. The algorithm, called uniformly reweighted belief propagation (URW-BP), combines the local nature of belief propagation with the improved performance of tree-reweighted belief propagation (TRW-BP) in graphs with cycles. It reduces the degrees of freedom in the latter algorithm to a single scalar variable, the uniform edge appearance probability ρ. We provide a variational interpretation of URW-BP, give insights into good choices of ρ, develop an extension to higher-order potentials, and complement our work with numerical performance results on three inference problems in wireless communication systems: spectrum sensing in cognitive radio, cooperative positioning, and decoding of a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code.