These factors are referred to as clique potentials in general MRFs, which are essentially functions that collectively determine the graph's joint probability.
let G = (V, E) denote a network of random variables, where V consists of the unobserved variables Y that need to be assigned values from label set L. Let Ψ denote a set of clique potentials that consists of two types of factors: Objective formulation Given an assignment y to all the unobserved variables Y and x to observed ones X (variables with known labels, if any), our objective function is associated with the following joint probability distribution where Z(x) is the normalization function.