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In a traditional classification problem, we wish to assign one of k labels (or classes) to each of n objects, in a way that is consistent with some observed data that we have about the problem. An active line of research in this area is concerned with classification when one has information about pairwise relationships among the objects to be classified; this issue is one of the principal motivations for the framework of Markov random fields, and it arises in areas such as image processing, biometry, and document analysis. In its most basic form, this style of analysis seeks to find a classification that optimizes a combinatorial function consisting of assignment costs---based on the individual choice of label we make for each object---and separation costs---based on the pair of choices we make for two "related" objects.We formulate a general classification problem of this type, the metric labeling problem; we show that it …