Bregman Conditional Random Fields: Sequence Labeling with Parallelizable Inference Algorithms

Caio Corro, Mathieu Lacroix, Joseph Le Roux


Abstract
We propose a novel discriminative model for sequence labeling called Bregman conditional random fields (BCRF).Contrary to standard linear-chain conditional random fields,BCRF allows fast parallelizable inference algorithms based on iterative Bregman projections.We show how such models can be learned using Fenchel-Young losses, including extension for learning from partial labels.Experimentally, our approach delivers comparable results to CRF while being faster, and achieves better results in highly constrained settings compared to mean field, another parallelizable alternative.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1430
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29557–29574
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1430/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Caio Corro, Mathieu Lacroix, and Joseph Le Roux. 2025. Bregman Conditional Random Fields: Sequence Labeling with Parallelizable Inference Algorithms. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 29557–29574, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bregman Conditional Random Fields: Sequence Labeling with Parallelizable Inference Algorithms (Corro et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1430.pdf