A New Class of Upper Bounds on the Log Partition Function

Bounds on the log partition function are important in a variety of contexts, including approximate inference, model tting, decision theory, and large deviations analysis [11, 5, 4]. We introduce a new class of upper bounds on the log partition function, based on convex combinations of distributions in the exponential domain, that is applicable to an arbitrary undirected graphical model. In the special case of convex combinations of tree-structured distributions, we obtain a family of variational problems, similar to the Bethe free energy, but distinguished by the following desirable properties: (i) they are convex, and have a unique global minimum; and (ii) the global minimum gives an upper bound on the log partition function