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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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-03 Rentian Yao , Linjun Huang , Yun Yang

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

Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that revolve around the estimation of the score function associated with a stochastic differential equation. Subsequent to its acquisition, the approximated score function is then…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus , Marta Gentiloni Silveri

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

Normalizing flows can generate complex target distributions and thus show promise in many applications in Bayesian statistics as an alternative or complement to MCMC for sampling posteriors. Since no data set from the target posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-19 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

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

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omri Ben-Dov , Luiz F. O. Chamon

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Mark Chiu Chong , Hien Duy Nguyen , TrungTin Nguyen

Score-matching generative models have proven successful at sampling from complex high-dimensional data distributions. In many applications, this distribution is believed to concentrate on a much lower $d$-dimensional manifold embedded into…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-25 Peter Potaptchik , Iskander Azangulov , George Deligiannidis

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

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

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

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

Several scalable sample-based methods to compute the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions have been proposed and applied in large-scale machine learning models. While they have been found to be unstable, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Sandesh Ghimire , Prashnna K Gyawali , Linwei Wang

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 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

We propose an algorithm to estimate the path-gradient of both the reverse and forward Kullback-Leibler divergence for an arbitrary manifestly invertible normalizing flow. The resulting path-gradient estimators are straightforward to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Lorenz Vaitl , Kim A. Nicoli , Shinichi Nakajima , Pan Kessel

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
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