Towards Completely Lifted Search-based Probabilistic Inference

The promise of lifted probabilistic inference is to carry out probabilistic inference in a relational probabilistic model without needing to reason about each individual separately (grounding out the representation) by treating the undistinguished individuals as a block. Current exact methods still need to ground out in some cases, typically because the representation of the intermediate results is not closed under the lifted operations. We set out to answer the question as to whether there is some fundamental reason why lifted algorithms would need to ground out undifferentiated individuals. We have two main results: (1) We completely characterize the cases where grounding is polynomial in a population size, and show how we can do lifted inference in time polynomial in the logarithm of the population size for these cases. (2) For the case of no-argument and single-argument parametrized random variables where the grounding is not polynomial in a population size, we present lifted inference which is polynomial in the population size whereas grounding is exponential. Neither of these cases requires reasoning separately about the individuals that are not explicitly mentioned.