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This paper studies a variant of the rate-distortion problem motivated by task-oriented semantic communication and distributed learning systems, where $M$ correlated sources are independently encoded for a central decoder. The decoder has…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Jiancheng Tang , Qianqian Yang

We improve the existing achievable rate regions for causal and for zero-delay source coding of stationary Gaussian sources under an average mean squared error (MSE) distortion measure. To begin with, we find a closed-form expression for the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2011-05-03 Milan S. Derpich , Jan Østergaard

We present novel algorithms for simulation optimization using random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA). These include first-order (gradient) as well as second-order (Newton) schemes. We incorporate both continuous-valued as well as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-08-11 Prashanth L. A. , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Michael Fu , Steve Marcus

We consider the problem of distributed lossy linear function computation in a tree network. We examine two cases: (i) data aggregation (only one sink node computes) and (ii) consensus (all nodes compute the same function). By quantifying…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Yaoqing Yang , Pulkit Grover , Soummya Kar

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Distribution matching methods for language model alignment such as Generation with Distributional Control (GDC) and Distributional Policy Gradient (DPG) have not received the same level of attention in reinforcement learning from human…

In lossy compression, Blau and Michaeli [5] introduced the information rate-distortion-perception (RDP) function, extending traditional rate-distortion theory by incorporating perceptual quality. More recently, this framework was expanded…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Nam Nguyen , Thinh Nguyen , Bella Bose

This pedagogical document explains three variational representations that are useful when comparing the efficiencies of reversible Markov chains: (i) the Dirichlet form and the associated variational representations of the spectral gaps;…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-23 Chris Sherlock

This paper proposes a unifying variational approach for proving and extending some fundamental information theoretic inequalities. Fundamental information theory results such as maximization of differential entropy, minimization of Fisher…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-05 Sangwoo Park , Erchin Serpedin , Khalid Qaraqe

The problem of estimating the directed information rate between two discrete processes $\{X_n\}$ and $\{Y_n\}$ via the plug-in (or maximum-likelihood) estimator is considered. When the joint process $\{(X_n,Y_n)\}$ is a Markov chain of a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-04-01 Ioannis Kontoyiannis , Maria Skoularidou

Directed information and its causally conditioned variations are often used to measure causal influences between random processes. In practice, these quantities must be measured from data. Non-asymptotic error bounds for these estimates are…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zijian Liang , Kai Niu , Changshuo Wang , Jin Xu , Ping Zhang

We formulate a new information-theoretic principle--the shifted composition rule--which bounds the divergence (e.g., Kullback-Leibler or R\'enyi) between the laws of two stochastic processes via the introduction of auxiliary shifts. In this…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-11-27 Jason M. Altschuler , Sinho Chewi

We introduce incremental variational inference and apply it to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Incremental variational inference is inspired by incremental EM and provides an alternative to stochastic variational inference. Incremental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-23 Cedric Archambeau , Beyza Ermis

The mutual information is a core statistical quantity that has applications in all areas of machine learning, whether this is in training of density models over multiple data modalities, in maximising the efficiency of noisy transmission…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-09-30 Shakir Mohamed , Danilo Jimenez Rezende

We deal with zero-delay source coding of a vector-valued Gauss-Markov source subject to a mean-squared error (MSE) fidelity criterion characterized by the operational zero-delay vector-valued Gaussian rate distortion function (RDF). We…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Photios A. Stavrou , Jan Ostergaard , Charalambos D. Charalambous

This paper studies random reshuffling (RR)-based distributed Nash equilibrium seeking for noncooperative games. The game is motivated as a sample-average approximation of an underlying expected-value stochastic game, while the algorithmic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-06 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Chen Bo , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang

We define the relevant information in a signal $x\in X$ as being the information that this signal provides about another signal $y\in \Y$. Examples include the information that face images provide about the names of the people portrayed, or…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2007-05-23 Naftali Tishby , Fernando C. Pereira , William Bialek

Distributional Random Forest (DRF) is a flexible forest-based method to estimate the full conditional distribution of a multivariate output of interest given input variables. In this article, we introduce a variable importance algorithm for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-15 Clément Bénard , Jeffrey Näf , Julie Josse