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Flow-based models typically define a latent space with dimensionality identical to the observational space. In many problems, however, the data does not populate the full ambient data space that they natively reside in, rather inhabiting a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-24 Mingtian Zhang , Yitong Sun , Chen Zhang , Steven McDonagh

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M. Stuart

Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental measure of the dissimilarity between two probability distributions, but it can become unstable in high-dimensional settings due to its sensitivity to mismatches in distributional support.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Yifeng Peng , Dantong Li , Xinyi Li , Zhiding Liang , Yongshan Ding , Ying Wang

Knowledge distillation (KD), transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model, has been investigated to design efficient neural architectures. Generally, the objective function of KD is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Taehyeon Kim , Jaehoon Oh , NakYil Kim , Sangwook Cho , Se-Young Yun

Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL) regularization is widely used in reinforcement learning, but it becomes infinite under support mismatch and can degenerate in low-noise limits. Utilizing a unified information-geometric framework, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Viktor Stein , Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Flow Matching has recently emerged as a popular class of generative models for simulating a target distribution $\mu_1$ from samples drawn from a source distribution $\mu_0$. This framework relies on a fixed coupling between $\mu_0$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Le-Tuyet-Nhi Pham , Giovanni Conforti , Zhenjie Ren , Alain Durmus

We build a new class of generative algorithms capable of efficiently learning an arbitrary target distribution from possibly scarce, high-dimensional data and subsequently generate new samples. These generative algorithms are particle-based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-29 Hyemin Gu , Panagiota Birmpa , Yannis Pantazis , Luc Rey-Bellet , Markos A. Katsoulakis

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk

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

We study the fundamental and timely problem of learning long sequences in autoregressive modeling and next-token prediction under model misspecification, measured by the joint Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Our goal is to characterize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yunbei Xu , Yuzhe Yuan , Ruohan Zhan

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$ which admits a density w.r.t. a dominating measure. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-06 Francesca Romana Crucinio

Density ratio estimation (DRE) is a fundamental machine learning technique for capturing relationships between two probability distributions. State-of-the-art DRE methods estimate the density ratio using neural networks trained with loss…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-18 Yoshiaki Kitazawa

Accelerated algorithms for maximum likelihood image reconstruction are essential for emerging applications such as 3D tomography, dynamic tomographic imaging, and other high dimensional inverse problems. In this paper, we introduce and…

Computation · Statistics 2012-01-31 Stéphane Chrétien , Alfred O. Hero

Flow Matching (FM) (also referred to as stochastic interpolants or rectified flows) stands out as a class of generative models that aims to bridge in finite time the target distribution $\nu^\star$ with an auxiliary distribution $\mu$,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-16 Marta Gentiloni Silveri , Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus

We present new and improved non-asymptotic deviation bounds for Dirichlet processes (DPs), formulated using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which is known for its optimal characterization of the asymptotic behavior of DPs. Our method…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-03-24 Pierre Perrault

We propose a closed-form spectral framework for relative log-density estimation in linearly parameterized probabilistic models, including unnormalized and conditional models. This is achieved by representing the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Francis Bach

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

Many problems in machine learning can be formulated as optimizing a convex functional over a vector space of measures. This paper studies the convergence of the mirror descent algorithm in this infinite-dimensional setting. Defining Bregman…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-12 Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Anna Korba , Flavien Léger