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Neural Information Processing Systems 

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper studies the worst case hardness of estimating the parameters of a binary pairwise undirected graphical model. By considering the specific case of the hard-core / independent set model and relying on the known result that approximating the partition function for this problem given the parameters (even for the unweighted case of all theta_i being 0) is hard, the authors show that the other direction -- namely, approximating the parameters given the node marginals -- is hard, in the sense that it does not admit an FPRAS. This is a strong theoretical paper, addressing a computational complexity problem that occurs very often in theory and practice, has been conjectured to be hard, but hadn't yet been shown formally to be hard (to the best of my and the authors' knowledge). The work is unlikely to have much impact in practice.