Non-Count Symmetries in Boolean & Multi-Valued Prob. Graphical Models

Abstract: Lifted inference algorithms commonly exploit symmetries in a probabilistic graphical model (PGM) for efficient inference. However, existing algorithms for Boolean-valued domains can identify only those pairs of states as symmetric, in which the number of ones and zeros match exactly (count symmetries). Moreover, algorithms for lifted inference in multi-valued domains also compute a multi-valued extension of count symmetries only. These algorithms miss many symmetries in a domain. In this paper, we present first algorithms to compute non-count symmetries in both Boolean-valued and multi-valued domains. Our methods can also find symmetries between multi-valued variables that have different domain cardinalities. The key insight in the algorithms is that they change the unit of symmetry computation from a variable to a variable-value (VV) pair. Our experiments find that exploiting these symmetries in MCMC can obtain substantial computational gains over existing algorithms.