English
Related papers

Related papers: Taming numerical imprecision by adapting the KL di…

200 papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a standard linear dimensionality reduction technique for nonnegative data sets. In order to measure the discrepancy between the input data and the low-rank approximation, the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-12 Le Thi Khanh Hien , Nicolas Gillis

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

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

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is one of the most important divergence measures between probability distributions. In this paper, we prove several properties of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. First, for any two…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Yufeng Zhang , Wanwei Liu , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang , Kenli Li

This study tackles the efficient estimation of Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence in Dirichlet Mixture Models (DMM), crucial for clustering compositional data. Despite the significance of DMMs, obtaining an analytically tractable solution for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-20 Samyajoy Pal , Christian Heumann

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

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

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

Generative models have achieved remarkable success across a range of applications, yet their evaluation still lacks principled uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we develop a method for comparing how close different generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Zijun Gao , Yan Sun , Han Su

In many applications in biology, engineering and economics, identifying similarities and differences between distributions of data from complex processes requires comparing finite categorical samples of discrete counts. Statistical…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-11 Francesco Camaglia , Ilya Nemenman , Thierry Mora , Aleksandra M. Walczak

Complex, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous across many scientific disciplines, including machine learning, biology, and the social sciences. One of the primary methods of visualizing these datasets is with two-dimensional scatter plots…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Kiran Smelser , Kaviru Gunaratne , Jacob Miller , Stephen Kobourov
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›