Related papers: f-Divergence constrained policy improvement
Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that revolve around the estimation of the score function associated with a stochastic differential equation. Subsequent to its acquisition, the approximated score function is then…
In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of 1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE)…
We consider the problem of estimating probability density functions based on sample data, using a finite mixture of densities from some component class. To this end, we introduce the $h$-lifted Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence as a…
Coupling arguments are a central tool for bounding the deviation between two stochastic processes, but traditionally have been limited to Wasserstein metrics. In this paper, we apply the shifted composition rule--an information-theoretic…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular framework for solving sequential decision problems due to its computational efficiency and theoretical simplicity. Some on-policy methods guarantee every policy update is…
Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental equation of information theory that quantifies the proximity of two probability distributions. Although difficult to understand by examining the equation, an intuition and understanding…
Divergences are quantities that measure discrepancy between two probability distributions and play an important role in various fields such as statistics and machine learning. Divergences are non-negative and are equal to zero if and only…
Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…
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…
The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…
Change of measure inequalities translate divergences between probability measures into explicit bounds on event probabilities, and play an important role in deriving probabilistic guarantees in learning theory, information theory, and…
Policy optimization methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants have achieved strong results on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Despite extensive exploration of reward processing strategies and…
The generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence (K-Ld) in Tsallis statistics [constrained by the additive duality of generalized statistics (dual generalized K-Ld)] is here reconciled with the theory of Bregman divergences for expectations…
The performance of machine learning classification algorithms are evaluated by estimating metrics, often from the confusion matrix, using training data and cross-validation. However, these do not prove that the best possible performance has…
Transfer learning, or domain adaptation, is concerned with machine learning problems in which training and testing data come from possibly different distributions (denoted as $\mu$ and $\mu'$, respectively). In this work, we give an…
\emph{Kullback-Leibler} (KL) regularization is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning algorithms in the form of \emph{reverse} or \emph{forward} KL. Recent studies have demonstrated $\epsilon^{-1}$-type fast rates for decision making under…
Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…
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…
We present and analyze the Krylov-Bellman Boosting (KBB) algorithm for policy evaluation in general state spaces. It alternates between fitting the Bellman residual using non-parametric regression (as in boosting), and estimating the value…