Bethe states of random factor graphs

Abstract

We verify a key component of the replica symmetry breaking hypothesis put forward in the physics literature [M\'ezard and Montanari 2009] on random factor graph models. For a broad class of these models we verify that the Gibbs measure can be decomposed into a moderate number of Bethe states, subsets of the state space in which both short and long range correlations of the measure take a simple form. Moreover, we show that the marginals of these Bethe states can be obtained from fixed points of the Belief Propagation operator. We derive these results from a new result on the approximation of general probability measures on discrete cubes by convex combinations of product measures.