Related papers: Minimax Optimal Estimation of KL Divergence for Co…
This paper concerns the approximation of probability measures on $\mathbf{R}^d$ with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Given an admissible target measure, we show the existence of the best approximation, with respect to this…
This paper deals with minimax rates of convergence for estimation of density functions on the real line. The densities are assumed to be location mixtures of normals, a global regularity requirement that creates subtle difficulties for the…
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…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…
In this paper we prove the optimality of an aggregation procedure. We prove lower bounds for aggregation of model selection type of $M$ density estimators for the Kullback-Leiber divergence (KL), the Hellinger's distance and the…
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…
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…
Generalized Gibbs kernels are those that may take any direction not necessarily bounded to each axis along the parameters of the objective function. We study how to optimally choose such directions in a Directional, random scan, Gibbs…
We consider the problem of constructing a least conservative estimator of the expected value $\mu$ of a non-negative heavy-tailed random variable. We require that the probability of overestimating the expected value $\mu$ is kept…
Consider the problem of estimating the Shannon entropy of a distribution over $k$ elements from $n$ independent samples. We show that the minimax mean-square error is within universal multiplicative constant factors of $$\Big(\frac{k }{n…
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…
We study Gaussian approximations to the distribution of a diffusion. The approximations are easy to compute: they are defined by two simple ordinary differential equations for the mean and the covariance. Time correlations can also be…
We address the problem of Schr\"odinger potential estimation, which plays a crucial role in modern generative modelling approaches based on Schr\"odinger bridges and stochastic optimal control for SDEs. Given a simple prior diffusion…
Orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF) has become a standard approach for clustering. As far as we know, most works on ONMF rely on the Frobenius norm to assess the quality of the approximation. This paper presents a new model…
We consider optimal sequential allocation in the context of the so-called stochastic multi-armed bandit model. We describe a generic index policy, in the sense of Gittins [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 41 (1979) 148-177], based on…
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…
Distribution regression seeks to estimate the conditional distribution of a multivariate response given a continuous covariate. This approach offers a more complete characterization of dependence than traditional regression methods.…
In this paper we propose a dimension-reduction strategy in order to improve the performance of importance sampling in high dimension. The idea is to estimate variance terms in a small number of suitably chosen directions. We first prove…
The Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Kullback-Leibler variation, and the Bernstein "norm" are used to quantify discrepancies among probability distributions in likelihood models such as nonparametric maximum likelihood and nonparametric…
Statistical distances (SDs), which quantify the dissimilarity between probability distributions, are central to machine learning and statistics. A modern method for estimating such distances from data relies on parametrizing a variational…