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We study the relation between the total variation (TV) and Hellinger distances between two Gaussian location mixtures. Our first result establishes a general upper bound: for any two mixing distributions supported on a compact set, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Joonhyuk Jung , Chao Gao

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

Pinsker's classical inequality asserts that the total variation $TV(\mu, \nu)$ between two probability measures is bounded by $\sqrt{ 2H(\mu|\nu)}$ where $H$ denotes the relative entropy (or Kullback-Leibler divergence). Considering the…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-30 Mathias Beiglböck , Markus Zona

A loss function measures the discrepancy between the true values (observations) and their estimated fits, for a given instance of data. A loss function is said to be proper (unbiased, Fisher consistent) if the fits are defined over a unit…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-05-11 Amichai Painsky , Gregory W. Wornell

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

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

$\alpha$-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

This paper deals with continuity preservation when minimizing generalized total variation with a $L^2$ fidelity term or a Dirichlet boundary condition. We extend several recent results in the two cases, mainly by showing comparison…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2017-04-14 Gwenael Mercier

Recently, a method called the Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) that uses neural networks has been proposed to estimate mutual information and more generally the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Kartik Ahuja

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 this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of 1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiequan Cui , Zhuotao Tian , Zhisheng Zhong , Xiaojuan Qi , Bei Yu , Hanwang Zhang

In this paper, some new upper bounds for Kullback-Leibler divergence(KL-divergence) based on $L^1, L^2$ and $L^\infty$ norms of density functions are discussed. Our findings unveil that the convergence in KL-divergence sense sandwiches…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-31 Liuquan Yao , Songhao Liu

The families of $f$-divergences (e.g. the Kullback-Leibler divergence) and Integral Probability Metrics (e.g. total variation distance or maximum mean discrepancies) are widely used to quantify the similarity between probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-08 Rohit Agrawal , Thibaut Horel

A well-known technique in estimating probabilities of rare events in general and in information theory in particular (used, e.g., in the sphere-packing bound), is that of finding a reference probability measure under which the event of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-12-23 Rami Atar , Neri Merhav

This paper proposes a new family of lower and upper bounds on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE). The key idea is to minimize/maximize the MMSE subject to the constraint that the joint distribution of the input-output statistics lies in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Michael Fauß , Alex Dysto , H. Vincent Poor

The generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence (K-Ld) in Tsallis statistics [constrained by the additive duality of generalized statistics (dual generalized K-Ld)] is here reconciled with the theory of Bregman divergences for expectations…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-27 R. C. Venkatesan , A. Plastino

We show that computing the total variation distance between two product distributions is $\#\mathsf{P}$-complete. This is in stark contrast with other distance measures such as Kullback-Leibler, Chi-square, and Hellinger, which tensorize…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Sutanu Gayen , Kuldeep S. Meel , Dimitrios Myrisiotis , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran

This archiving article consists of several short reports on the discussions between the two authors over the past two years at Oxford and Madrid, and their work carried out during that period on the upper bound of the Kullback-Leibler…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Min Chen , Mateu Sbert

We derive a closed form solution for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two Weibull distributions. These notes are meant as reference material and intended to provide a guided tour towards a result that is often mentioned but seldom…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-10-15 Christian Bauckhage

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