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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

We study the problem of closeness testing for continuous distributions and its implications for causal discovery. Specifically, we analyze the sample complexity of distinguishing whether two multidimensional continuous distributions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Fateme Jamshidi , Sina Akbari , Negar Kiyavash

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

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

Discriminator Guidance has become a popular method for efficiently refining pre-trained Score-Matching Diffusion models. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that the standard implementation of this technique does not necessarily lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Alexandre Verine , Ahmed Mehdi Inane , Florian Le Bronnec , Benjamin Negrevergne , Yann Chevaleyre

The maximum entropy principle is a powerful tool for solving underdetermined inverse problems. This paper considers the problem of discretizing a continuous distribution, which arises in various applied fields. We obtain the approximating…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-05 Ken'ichiro Tanaka , Alexis Akira Toda

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dirk van der Hoeven , Julia Olkhovskaia , Tim van Erven

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

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

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

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yuheng Bu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

We compute the expected value of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to various fundamental statistical models with respect to canonical priors on the probability simplex. We obtain closed formulas for the expected model approximation errors,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-06-18 Guido F. Montufar , Johannes Rauh

Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental measure of the dissimilarity between two probability distributions, but it can become unstable in high-dimensional settings due to its sensitivity to mismatches in distributional support.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Yifeng Peng , Dantong Li , Xinyi Li , Zhiding Liang , Yongshan Ding , Ying Wang

Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Taiqiang Wu , Chaofan Tao , Jiahao Wang , Runming Yang , Zhe Zhao , Ngai Wong

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

In this paper we provide an asymptotic theory for the symmetric version of the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. We define a estimator for this divergence and study its asymptotic properties. In particular, we prove Law of Large Numbers…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-01-31 Helder Rojas , Artem Logachov

We conduct a KL-divergence based procedure for testing elliptical distributions. The procedure simultaneously takes into account the two defining properties of an elliptically distributed random vector: independence between length and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Yin Tang , Yanyuan Ma , Bing Li

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Complex, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous across many scientific disciplines, including machine learning, biology, and the social sciences. One of the primary methods of visualizing these datasets is with two-dimensional scatter plots…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Kiran Smelser , Kaviru Gunaratne , Jacob Miller , Stephen Kobourov

In this paper, we study the statistical and geometrical properties of the Kullback-Leibler divergence with kernel covariance operators (KKL) introduced by Bach [2022]. Unlike the classical Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence that involves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Clémentine Chazal , Anna Korba , Francis Bach