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We give new upper and lower bounds on the minimax sample complexity of differentially private mean estimation of distributions with bounded $k$-th moments. Roughly speaking, in the univariate case, we show that $n =…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Gautam Kamath , Vikrant Singhal , Jonathan Ullman

Discrete state space diffusion models have shown significant advantages in applications involving discrete data, such as text and image generation. It has also been observed that their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Yuchen Liang , Renxiang Huang , Lifeng Lai , Ness Shroff , Yingbin Liang

We introduce methods to bound the mean of a discrete distribution (or finite population) based on sample data, for random variables with a known set of possible values. In particular, the methods can be applied to categorical data with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Eric Bax , Frédéric Ouimet

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

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

Knowledge distillation (KD) has become a powerful tool for training compact student models using larger, pretrained teacher models, often requiring less data and computational resources. Teacher models typically possess more layers and thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Edvin Fasth , Sagar Singh

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying goodness-of-fit over the last decade, featuring numerous successful applications. To the best of our knowledge, all existing KSD estimators with known rate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo , Agnideep Aich , Florian Kalinke , Ashit Baran Aich , Zoltán Szabó

We consider diffraction at random point scatterers on general discrete point sets in $\R^\nu$, restricted to a finite volume. We allow for random amplitudes and random dislocations of the scatterers. We investigate the speed of convergence…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 C. Kuelske

The $k$-center problem is a central optimization problem with numerous applications for machine learning, data mining, and communication networks. Despite extensive study in various scenarios, it surprisingly has not been thoroughly…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Leyla Biabani , Ami Paz

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-23 Dao Nguyen

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

We conduct a KL-divergence based procedure for testing elliptical distributions. The procedure simultaneously takes into account the two defining properties of an elliptically distributed random vector: independence between length and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Yin Tang , Yanyuan Ma , Bing Li

We study the problem of distinguishing between two symmetric probability distributions over $n$ bits by observing $k$ bits of a sample, subject to the constraint that all $k-1$-wise marginal distributions of the two distributions are…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Christopher Williamson

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…

In this paper we prove the optimality of an aggregation procedure. We prove lower bounds for aggregation of model selection type of $M$ density estimators for the Kullback-Leiber divergence (KL), the Hellinger's distance and the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-08-16 Guillaume Lecué

It is well known that under general regularity conditions the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is asymptotically normal. Very recently, bounds of the optimal order $O(1/\sqrt n)$ on the closeness of the distribution of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-12-15 Iosif Pinelis

Much of the literature on differential privacy focuses on item-level privacy, where loosely speaking, the goal is to provide privacy per item or training example. However, recently many practical applications such as federated learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Yuhan Liu , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Felix Yu , Sanjiv Kumar , Michael Riley

We consider the problem of estimating a $d$-dimensional discrete distribution from its samples observed under a $b$-bit communication constraint. In contrast to most previous results that largely focus on the global minimax error, we study…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Wei-Ning Chen , Peter Kairouz , Ayfer Özgür

Dirichlet distributions are probability measures on the unit simplex. They are often used as prior distributions in modeling categorical data, such as in topic analysis of text data. Motivated by this application, we consider Monte Carlo…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-07 Ayeong Lee

Suppose $k$ centers are fit to $m$ points by heuristically minimizing the $k$-means cost; what is the corresponding fit over the source distribution? This question is resolved here for distributions with $p\geq 4$ bounded moments; in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-11 Matus Telgarsky , Sanjoy Dasgupta