We study the task of smoothing a circuit, i.e., ensuring that all children of a

This section introduces the algorithmic construction of gadget circuits that will be adopted in our proofs of tractability as well as hardness. A construction algorithm for the support circuit is provided in Alg. 1. This construction is summarized in Alg. 2. It is a key component in the algorithms for many tractable We define a circuit representation of the #3SA T problem, following the construction in Khosravi et al. This section formally presents the tractability and hardness results w.r.t. The hardness of the sum of two circuits to yield a deterministic circuit has been proven by Shen et al.

Circuit representations are becoming the lingua franca to express and reason about tractable generative and discriminative models.

Probabilistic circuits compute multilinear polynomials that represent probability distributions. They are tractable models that support efficient marginal inference. However, various polynomial semantics have been considered in the literature (e.g., network polynomials, likelihood polynomials, generating functions, Fourier transforms, and characteristic polynomials). The relationships between these polynomial encodings of distributions is largely unknown. In this paper, we prove that for binary distributions, each of these probabilistic circuit models is equivalent in the sense that any circuit for one of them can be transformed into a circuit for any of the others with only a polynomial increase in size. They are therefore all tractable for marginal inference on the same class of distributions. Finally, we explore the natural extension of one such polynomial semantics, called probabilistic generating circuits, to categorical random variables, and establish that marginal inference becomes #P-hard.

Circuit representations are becoming the lingua franca to express and reason about tractable generative and discriminative models. In this paper, we show how complex inference scenarios for these models that commonly arise in machine learning -- from computing the expectations of decision tree ensembles to information-theoretic divergences of deep mixture models -- can be represented in terms of tractable modular operations over circuits. Specifically, we characterize the tractability of a vocabulary of simple transformations -- sums, products, quotients, powers, logarithms, and exponentials -- in terms of sufficient structural constraints of the circuits they operate on, and present novel hardness results for the cases in which these properties are not satisfied. Building on these operations, we derive a unified framework for reasoning about tractable models that generalizes several results in the literature and opens up novel tractable inference scenarios.

Scores based on Shapley values are currently widely used for providing explanations to classification results over machine learning models. A prime example of this corresponds to the influential SHAP-score, a version of the Shapley value in which the contribution of a set $S$ of features from a given entity $\mathbf{e}$ over a model $M$ is defined as the expected value in $M$ of the set of entities $\mathbf{e}'$ that coincide with $\mathbf{e}$ over all features in $S$. While in general computing Shapley values is a computationally intractable problem, it has recently been claimed that the SHAP-score can be computed in polynomial time over the class of decision trees. In this paper, we provide a proof of a stronger result over Boolean models: the SHAP-score can be computed in polynomial time over deterministic and decomposable Boolean circuits, also known as tractable probabilistic circuits. Such circuits encompass a wide range of Boolean circuits and binary decision diagrams classes, including binary decision trees and Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs). Moreover, we establish the computational limits of the notion of SHAP-score by showing that computing it over a class of Boolean models is always (polynomially) as hard as the model counting problem for this class (under some mild condition). This implies, for instance, that computing the SHAP-score for DNF propositional formulae is a #P-hard problem, and, thus, that determinism is essential for the circuits that we consider.

We study the task of smoothing a circuit, i.e., ensuring that all children of a plus-gate mention the same variables. Circuits serve as the building blocks of state-of-the-art inference algorithms on discrete probabilistic graphical models and probabilistic programs. They are also important for discrete density estimation algorithms. Many of these tasks require the input circuit to be smooth. However, smoothing has not been studied in its own right yet, and only a trivial quadratic algorithm is known. This paper studies efficient smoothing for structured decomposable circuits. We propose a near-linear time algorithm for this task and explore lower bounds for smoothing general circuits, using existing results on range-sum queries. Further, for the important special case of All-Marginals, we show a more efficient linear-time algorithm. We validate experimentally the performance of our methods.