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Machine learning models are increasingly trained or fine-tuned on synthetic data. Recursively training on such data has been observed to significantly degrade performance in a wide range of tasks, often characterized by a progressive drift…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Nail B. Khelifa , Richard E. Turner , Ramji Venkataramanan

Large language models present challenges for principled uncertainty quantification, in part due to their complexity and the diversity of their outputs. Semantic dispersion, or the variance in the meaning of sampled answers, has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Edward Phillips , Sean Wu , Fredrik K. Gustafsson , Boyan Gao , David A. Clifton

When the performance of a machine learning model varies over groups defined by sensitive attributes (e.g., gender or ethnicity), the performance disparity can be expressed in terms of the probability distributions of the input and output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Hao Wang , Berk Ustun , Flavio P. Calmon

In many real-world regression tasks, the data distribution is heavily skewed, and models learn predominantly from abundant majority samples while failing to predict minority labels accurately. While imbalanced classification has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shayan Alahyari

We introduce the diffusion and superposition distances as two metrics to compare signals supported in the nodes of a network. Both metrics consider the given vectors as initial temperature distributions and diffuse heat trough the edges of…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2014-12-01 Santiago Segarra , Weiyu Huang , Alejandro Ribeiro

Hypothesis testing in high dimensional data is a notoriously difficult problem without direct access to competing models' likelihood functions. This paper argues that statistical divergences can be used to quantify the difference between…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2024-08-02 Jeremy J. H. Wilkinson , Christopher G. Lester

Codifference is a commonly used measure of dependence for stable vectors and processes for which covariance is infinite. However, we argue that it can also be used for other heavy-tail distributions and it provides useful information for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Jakub Ślęzak

Estimation of the $\phi$-divergence between two unknown probability distributions using empirical data is a fundamental problem in information theory and statistical learning. We consider a multi-variate generalization of the data dependent…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-01-04 Fengqiao Luo , Sanjay Mehrotra

Mixture distributions arise in many application areas, for example as marginal distributions or convolutions of distributions. We present a method of constructing an easily tractable discrete mixture distribution as an approximation to a…

Computation · Statistics 2017-02-20 Christian Röver , Tim Friede

Given $n$ independent samples from a $d$-dimensional probability distribution, our aim is to generate diffusion-based samples from a distribution obtained by tilting the original, where the degree of tilt is parametrized by $\theta \in…

A key element in transfer learning is representation learning; if representations can be developed that expose the relevant factors underlying the data, then new tasks and domains can be learned readily based on mappings of these salient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-12-18 Yujia Li , Kevin Swersky , Richard Zemel

The ability to compute the exact divergence between two high-dimensional distributions is useful in many applications but doing so naively is intractable. Computing the alpha-beta divergence -- a family of divergences that includes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Loong Kuan Lee , Geoffrey I. Webb , Daniel F. Schmidt , Nico Piatkowski

Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ and a description of a distribution $q$, are $p$ and $q$ close or far? This question of "identity testing" has received significant attention in the case of testing whether $p$ and $q$ are…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Constantinos Daskalakis , Gautam Kamath , John Wright

We present a novel approach to estimating discrete distributions with (potentially) infinite support in the total variation metric. In a departure from the established paradigm, we make no structural assumptions whatsoever on the sampling…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-16 Doron Cohen , Aryeh Kontorovich , Geoffrey Wolfer

Mixture distributions are extensively used as a modeling tool in diverse areas from machine learning to communications engineering to physics, and obtaining bounds on the entropy of probability distributions is of fundamental importance in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-12-05 James Melbourne , Saurav Talukdar , Shreyas Bhaban , Mokshay Madiman , Murti V. Salapaka

Kernel embeddings of distributions and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the resulting distance between distributions, are useful tools for fully nonparametric two-sample testing and learning on distributions. However, it is rarely that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Ho Chung Leon Law , Christopher Yau , Dino Sejdinovic

Learning from ambiguous labels is a long-standing problem in practical machine learning applications. The purpose of \emph{partial label learning} (PLL) is to identify the ground-truth label from a set of candidate labels associated with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Jinfu Fan , Xiaohui Zhong , Kangrui Ren , Jiangnan Li , Linqing Huang

We consider distributions on $\mathbb{R}$ that can be written as the sum of a non-zero discrete distribution and an absolutely continuous distribution. We show that such a distribution is quasi-infinitely divisible if and only if its…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-04-21 David Berger , Merve Kutlu

Consider a class of probability distributions which is dense in the space of all probability distributions on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ with respect to weak convergence, for every $d\in\mathbb{N}$. Then, we construct various explicit classes of…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-12-03 Riccardo Passeggeri

Diffusion models have made significant advances recently in high-quality image synthesis and related tasks. However, diffusion models trained on real-world datasets, which often follow long-tailed distributions, yield inferior fidelity for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Divin Yan , Lu Qi , Vincent Tao Hu , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Meng Tang