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Modelling bounded rational decision-making through information constrained processing provides a principled approach for representing departures from rationality within a reinforcement learning framework, while still treating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Benjamin Patrick Evans , Leo Ardon , Sumitra Ganesh

We derive the Kullback-Leibler divergence for the normal-gamma distribution and show that it is identical to the Bayesian complexity penalty for the univariate general linear model with conjugate priors. Based on this finding, we provide…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-07 Joram Soch , Carsten Allefeld

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distribution in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-11 Francesca R. Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja

We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-26 Jiaxin Shi , Chang Liu , Lester Mackey

Knowledge distillation involves transferring knowledge from large, cumbersome teacher models to more compact student models. The standard approach minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the probabilistic outputs of a teacher…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Nikolaos Giakoumoglou , Tania Stathaki

In this paper, we propose a novel numerical scheme to optimize the gradient flows for learning energy-based models (EBMs). From a perspective of physical simulation, we redefine the problem of approximating the gradient flow utilizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yang Wu , Pengxu Wei , Liang Lin

We study the problem of spectrum estimation from transmission data of a known phantom. The goal is to reconstruct an x-ray spectrum that can accurately model the x-ray transmission curves and reflects a realistic shape of the typical energy…

Medical Physics · Physics 2021-07-14 Wooseok Ha , Emil Y. Sidky , Rina Foygel Barber , Taly Gilat Schmidt , Xiaochuan Pan

Variational approximations are increasingly based on gradient-based optimization of expectations estimated by sampling. Handling discrete latent variables is then challenging because the sampling process is not differentiable. Continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Arto Klami

We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-23 Yi-An Ma , Niladri Chatterji , Xiang Cheng , Nicolas Flammarion , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for energy-efficient and biologically plausible computation. However, due to limitations in existing training methods and inherent model constraints, SNNs often exhibit a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Tianqing Zhang , Zixin Zhu , Kairong Yu , Hongwei Wang

Motivated by the increasingly popular Score-based Generative Modeling (SGM), we study the Inexact Langevin Dynamics (ILD) and Inexact Langevin Algorithm (ILA) where a score function estimate is used in place of the exact score. We establish…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kaylee Yingxi Yang , Andre Wibisono

This paper shows that large nonparametric classes of conditional multivariate densities can be approximated in the Kullback--Leibler distance by different specifications of finite mixtures of normal regressions in which normal means and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-10-05 Andriy Norets

We construct optimal low-rank approximations for the Gaussian posterior distribution in linear Gaussian inverse problems with possibly infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert parameter spaces and finite-dimensional data spaces. We first…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-09 Giuseppe Carere , Han Cheng Lie

Ensembles of machine learning models yield improved system performance as well as robust and interpretable uncertainty estimates; however, their inference costs may often be prohibitively high. \emph{Ensemble Distribution Distillation} is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Max Ryabinin , Andrey Malinin , Mark Gales

We give a comprehensive description of Wasserstein gradient flows of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) functionals $\mathcal F_\nu := \text{MMD}_K^2(\cdot, \nu)$ towards given target measures $\nu$ on the real line, where we focus on the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Richard Duong , Viktor Stein , Robert Beinert , Johannes Hertrich , Gabriele Steidl

In this work, we propose a novel information theoretic framework for dictionary learning (DL) and sparse coding (SC) on a statistical manifold (the manifold of probability distributions). Unlike the traditional DL and SC framework, our new…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-02-06 Rudrasis Chakraborty , Monami Banerjee , Victoria Crawford , Baba C. Vemuri

Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Yilun Xu , Weili Nie , Arash Vahdat

Diffusion alignment adapts pretrained diffusion models to sample from reward-tilted distributions along the denoising trajectory. This process naturally admits a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) interpretation, where the denoising model acts as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Zijing Ou , Jacob Si , Junyi Zhu , Ondrej Bohdal , Mete Ozay , Taha Ceritli , Yingzhen Li

Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mathias Niepert , Pasquale Minervini , Luca Franceschi

We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Wei Han , Yun Yang