Factor Graph Neural Networks
Zhen Zhang Mohammed Haroon Dupty Fan Wu Javen Qinfeng Shi Wee Sun Lee
In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs),
most of which can learn powerful representations in an end-to-end fashion with
great success in many real-world applications. They have resemblance to
Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs), but break free from some limitations of
PGMs. By aiming to provide expressive methods for representation learning
instead of computing marginals or most likely configurations, GNNs provide
flexibility in the choice of information flowing rules while maintaining good
performance. Despite their success and inspirations, they lack efficient ways
to represent and learn higher-order relations among variables/nodes. More
expressive higher-order GNNs which operate on k-tuples of nodes need increased
computational resources in order to process higher-order tensors. We propose
Factor Graph Neural Networks (FGNNs) to effectively capture higher-order
relations for inference and learning. To do so, we first derive an efficient
approximate Sum-Product loopy belief propagation inference algorithm for
discrete higher-order PGMs. We then neuralize the novel message passing scheme
into a Factor Graph Neural Network (FGNN) module by allowing richer
representations of the message update rules; this facilitates both efficient
inference and powerful end-to-end learning. We further show that with a
suitable choice of message aggregation operators, our FGNN is also able to
represent Max-Product belief propagation, providing a single family of
architecture that can represent both Max and Sum-Product loopy belief
propagation. Our extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic as well as real
datasets demonstrates the potential of the proposed model.