We define two algorithms for propagating information in classification problems with pairwise relationships. The algorithms involve contraction maps and are related to non-linear diffusion and random walks on graphs. The approach is also related to message passing and mean field methods. The algorithms we describe are guaranteed to converge on graphs with arbitrary topology. Moreover they always converge to a unique fixed point, independent of initialization. We prove that the fixed points of the algorithms under consideration define lower-bounds on the energy function and the max-marginals of a Markov random field. Our theoretical results also illustrate a relationship between message passing algorithms and value iteration for an infinite horizon Markov decision process. We illustrate the practical feasibility of our algorithms with preliminary experiments in image restoration and stereo depth estimation.