Convex Combination Belief Propagation Algorithms

We introduce new message passing algorithms for inference with graphical models. The standard min-sum and sum-product belief propagation algorithms are guaranteed to converge when the graph is tree-structured, but may not converge and can be sensitive to the initialization when the graph contains cycles. This paper describes modifications to the standard belief propagation algorithms that are guaranteed to converge to a unique solution regardless of the topology of the graph.