  A successful approach to structured learning is to write the learning
objective as a joint function of linear parameters and inference messages, and
iterate between updates to each. This paper observes that if the inference
problem is "smoothed" through the addition of entropy terms, for fixed
messages, the learning objective reduces to a traditional (non-structured)
logistic regression problem with respect to parameters. In these logistic
regression problems, each training example has a bias term determined by the
current set of messages. Based on this insight, the structured energy function
can be extended from linear factors to any function class where an "oracle"
exists to minimize a logistic loss.
