Related papers: A deterministic and computable Bernstein-von Mises…
We explore the computational content of Kronecker's lemma via the proof-theoretic perspective of proof mining and utilise the resulting finitary variant of this fundamental result to provide new rates for the Strong Law of Large Numbers for…
We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…
Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…
We give the first mathematically rigorous justification of the Local Density Approximation in Density Functional Theory. We provide a quantitative estimate on the difference between the grand-canonical Levy-Lieb energy of a given density…
We interpret likelihood-based test functions from a geometric perspective where the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is adopted to quantify the distance from a distribution to another. Such a test function can be seen as a sub-Gaussian…
The purpose of this paper is twofold. On a technical side, we propose an extension of the Hausdorff distance from metric spaces to spaces equipped with asymmetric distance measures. Specifically, we focus on the family of Bregman…
We present non-asymptotic two-sided bounds to the log-marginal likelihood in Bayesian inference. The classical Laplace approximation is recovered as the leading term. Our derivation permits model misspecification and allows the parameter…
We extend several recent results providing symmetry-based guarantees for variational inference (VI) with location-scale families. VI approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q^*$ in a family $Q$ of tractable distributions that…
We study predictive density estimation under Kullback-Leibler loss in $\ell_0$-sparse Gaussian sequence models. We propose proper Bayes predictive density estimates and establish asymptotic minimaxity in sparse models. A surprise is the…
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density function $f_0$ which is known to satisfy further constraints, where either (a) the mode $m$ of $f_0$ is known, or (b) $f_0$ is known to be symmetric about a fixed…
In this paper, we develop a general approach to proving global and local uniform limit theorems for the Horvitz-Thompson empirical process arising from complex sampling designs. Global theorems such as Glivenko-Cantelli and Donsker…
The population $\mathrm{KL}_{\inf}$ is a fundamental quantity that appears in lower bounds for (asymptotically) optimal regret of pure-exploration stochastic bandit algorithms, and optimal stopping time of sequential tests. Motivated by…
The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In…
Motivated by the computation of the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) and the Bayesian posterior in statistics, this paper explores the problem of convex optimization over the space of all probability distributions. We…
Variational Bayes (VB) provides a computationally efficient alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo, especially for high-dimensional and large-scale inference. However, existing theory on VB primarily focuses on fixed-dimensional settings…
Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be i.i.d. log-concave random vectors in $\mathbb R^d$ with mean 0 and covariance matrix $\Sigma$. We study the problem of quantifying the normal approximation error for $W=n^{-1/2}\sum_{i=1}^nX_i$ with explicit…
Consider the Gaussian sequence model under the additional assumption that a fixed fraction of the means is known. We study the problem of variance estimation from a frequentist Bayesian perspective. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)…
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…
Classical (or ``global'') Bernstein theory establishes sharp control on entire functions of exponential type that are bounded and real-valued on the real axis. We localize some of this theory to rectangular regions $\{ x+iy: x \in I, 0 \leq…
We discuss Bayesian methods for learning Bayesian networks when data sets are incomplete. In particular, we examine asymptotic approximations for the marginal likelihood of incomplete data given a Bayesian network. We consider the Laplace…