Lifted first-order probabilistic inference

• Authors: Dan Roth;Rodrigo De Salvo Braz
• Venue: Lifted first-order probabilistic inference
• Year: 2007

There has been a long standing division in AI between logical symbolic and probabilistic reasoning approaches. While probabilistic models can deal well with inherent uncertainty in many real-world domains, they operate on a mostly propositional level. Logic systems, on the other hand, can deal with much richer representations, especially first-order ones. In the last two decades, many probabilistic algorithms accepting first-order specifications have been proposed, but in the inference stage they still operate mostly on a propositional level, where the rich and useful first-order structure is not explicit anymore. In this thesis we present a framework for lifted inference on first-order models, that is, inference where the main operations occur on a first-order level, without the need to prop ositionalize the model. We clearly define the semantics of first-order probabilistic models, present an algorithm (FOVE) that performs lifted inference, and show detailed proofs of its correctness. Furthermore, we describe how to solve the Most Probable Explanation problem with a variant of FOVE, and present a new anytime probabilistic inference algorithm, ABVE, meant to generalize the ability of logical systems to gradually process a model and stop as soon as an answer is available.