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Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Andrés Muñoz , Rodrigo Ramele

Selecting an appropriate divergence measure is a critical aspect of machine learning, as it directly impacts model performance. Among the most widely used, we find the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, originally introduced in kinetic…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-07-16 Gennaro Auricchio , Giovanni Brigati , Paolo Giudici , Giuseppe Toscani

This work presents an upper-bound to value that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can reach for a class of probability distributions called quantum distributions (QD). The aim is to find a distribution $U$ which maximizes the KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Vincenzo Bonnici

This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Song Fang , Quanyan Zhu

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a foundational measure for comparing probability distributions. Yet in multivariate settings, its single value often obscures the underlying reasons for divergence, conflating mismatches in individual…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-06 William Cook

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Mikil Foss , Andrew Lamperski

Inferring and comparing complex, multivariable probability density functions is fundamental to problems in several fields, including probabilistic learning, network theory, and data analysis. Classification and prediction are the two faces…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-03-30 David J. Galas , T. Gregory Dewey , James Kunert-Graf , Nikita A. Sakhanenko

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is one of the most important divergence measures between probability distributions. In this paper, we prove several properties of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. First, for any two…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Yufeng Zhang , Wanwei Liu , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang , Kenli Li

Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Sandesh Ghimire , Aria Masoomi , Jennifer Dy

We study concentration inequalities for the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between the empirical distribution and the true distribution. Applying a recursion technique, we improve over the method of types bound uniformly in all regimes…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Jay Mardia , Jiantao Jiao , Ervin Tánczos , Robert D. Nowak , Tsachy Weissman

In many applications in biology, engineering and economics, identifying similarities and differences between distributions of data from complex processes requires comparing finite categorical samples of discrete counts. Statistical…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-11 Francesco Camaglia , Ilya Nemenman , Thierry Mora , Aleksandra M. Walczak

Generative models have achieved remarkable success across a range of applications, yet their evaluation still lacks principled uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we develop a method for comparing how close different generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Zijun Gao , Yan Sun , Han Su

Discrete normal distributions are defined as the distributions with prescribed means and covariance matrices which maximize entropy on the integer lattice support. The set of discrete normal distributions form an exponential family with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Frank Nielsen

The Kullback-Leibler divergence or relative entropy is an information-theoretic measure between statistical models that play an important role in measuring a distance between random variables. In the study of complex systems, random fields…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Alexandre L. M. Levada

How much one has learned from an experiment is quantifiable by the information gain, also known as the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The narrowing of the posterior parameter distribution $P(\theta|D)$ compared with the prior parameter…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-08-29 Johannes Buchner

A well-known technique in estimating probabilities of rare events in general and in information theory in particular (used, e.g., in the sphere-packing bound), is that of finding a reference probability measure under which the event of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-12-23 Rami Atar , Neri Merhav

Learning word representations has garnered greater attention in the recent past due to its diverse text applications. Word embeddings encapsulate the syntactic and semantic regularities of sentences. Modelling word embedding as multi-sense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-15 P. Jayashree , Ballijepalli Shreya , P. K. Srijith

We derive a closed form solution for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two Weibull distributions. These notes are meant as reference material and intended to provide a guided tour towards a result that is often mentioned but seldom…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-10-15 Christian Bauckhage
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