English
Related papers

Related papers: On the Properties of Kullback-Leibler Divergence B…

200 papers

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Shiji Xiao , Yufeng Zhang , Chubo Liu , Yan Ding , Keqin Li , Kenli Li

This work presents an upper-bound to value that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can reach for a class of probability distributions called quantum distributions (QD). The aim is to find a distribution $U$ which maximizes the KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Vincenzo Bonnici

We study the problem of characterizing the stability of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence under Gaussian perturbations beyond Gaussian families. Existing relaxed triangle inequalities for KL divergence critically rely on the assumption that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Jialu Pan , Yufeng Zhang , Nan Hu , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang , Keqin Li

This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Song Fang , Quanyan Zhu

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

In this paper, we discuss a property of the Kullback--Leibler divergence measured between two models of the family of the location-scale distributions. We show that, if model $M_1$ and model $M_2$ are represented by location-scale…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-04-08 Cristiano Villa

We examine the estimation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the use of the goodness-of-fit test for multivariate continuous distributions. Our starting point is the maximum entropy principle for Shannon entropy: among all…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Mehmet Siddik Cadirci , Martin Singull

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-04-09 Jonathon Shlens

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a foundational measure for comparing probability distributions. Yet in multivariate settings, its single value often obscures the underlying reasons for divergence, conflating mismatches in individual…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-06 William Cook

We establish bounds on the KL divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions in terms of the Hamming distance between the edge sets of the corresponding graphical models. We show that the KL divergence is bounded below by a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-04-06 Varun Jog , Po-Ling Loh

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

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

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

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Yan Wang

$\alpha$-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

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Tetsuya Kaji

We derive a deterministic, non-asymptotic upper bound on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the flow-matching distribution approximation. In particular, if the $L_2$ flow-matching loss is bounded by $\epsilon^2 > 0$, then the KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Maojiang Su , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Sophia Pi , Han Liu

In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-06-02 Frank Pinski , Gideon Simpson , Andrew Stuart , Hendrik Weber
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›