Temporal Parallelization of Bayesian Smoothers

Abstract: This paper presents algorithms for temporal parallelization of Bayesian smoothers. We define the elements and the operators to pose these problems as the solutions to all-prefix-sums operations for which efficient parallel scan-algorithms are available. We present the temporal parallelization of the general Bayesian filtering and smoothing equations and specialize them to linear/Gaussian models. The advantage of the proposed algorithms is that they reduce the linear complexity of standard smoothing algorithms with respect to time to logarithmic.