Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Probability and Combinatorics

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - 3:30pm

Qian Yu

Princeton University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C4

In the study of Ising models on large locally tree-like graphs, in both rigorous and non-rigorous methods one is often led to understanding the so-called belief propagation distributional recursions and its fixed points. We prove that there is at most one non-trivial fixed point for Ising models with zero or certain random external fields. Previously this was only known for sufficiently ``low-temperature'' models. 
 
Our result simultaneously closes the following 6 conjectures in the literature: 1) independence of robust reconstruction accuracy to leaf noise in broadcasting on trees (Mossel-Neeman-Sly'16); 2) uselessness of global information for a labeled 2-community stochastic block model, or 2-SBM (Kanade-Mossel-Schramm'16); 3) optimality of local algorithms for 2-SBM under noisy side information (Mossel-Xu'16); 4) uniqueness of BP fixed point in broadcasting on trees in the Gaussian (large degree) limit (ibid); 5) boundary irrelevance in broadcasting on trees (Abbe-Cornacchia-Gu-Polyanskiy'21); 6) characterization of entropy (and mutual information) of community labels given the graph in 2-SBM (ibid). 
 
This is a joint work with Yury Polyanskiy.
 
Paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15242

Other Events on This Day