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A theoretical framework for non-negative matrix factorization based on generalized dual Kullback-Leibler divergence, which includes members of the exponential family of models, is proposed. A family of algorithms is developed using this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-20 Karthik Devarajan

To ensure stability of learning, state-of-the-art generalized policy iteration algorithms augment the policy improvement step with a trust region constraint bounding the information loss. The size of the trust region is commonly determined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

We study Gaussian approximations to the distribution of a diffusion. The approximations are easy to compute: they are defined by two simple ordinary differential equations for the mean and the covariance. Time correlations can also be…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Daniel Sanz-Alonso , Andrew M. Stuart

Maximizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) is a fundamental problem in waveform design for active sensing and hypothesis testing, as it directly relates to the error exponent of detection probability. However, the associated…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-05 Jeongwoo Park , Seongkyu Jung , Kaiming Shen , Jeonghun Park

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

Wide conditions are provided to guarantee asymptotic unbiasedness and L^2-consistency of the introduced estimates of the Kullback-Leibler divergence for probability measures in R^d having densities w.r.t. the Lebesgue measure. These…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-07-02 Alexander Bulinski , Denis Dimitrov

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Shiji Xiao , Yufeng Zhang , Chubo Liu , Yan Ding , Keqin Li , Kenli Li

The Pinsker inequality lower bounds the Kullback--Leibler divergence $D_{\textrm{KL}}$ in terms of total variation and provides a canonical way to convert $D_{\textrm{KL}}$ control into $\lVert \cdot \rVert_1$-control. Motivated by…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Guglielmo Beretta , Tommaso Cesari , Roberto Colomboni

Discrete normal distributions are defined as the distributions with prescribed means and covariance matrices which maximize entropy on the integer lattice support. The set of discrete normal distributions form an exponential family with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Frank Nielsen

Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are widely used statistical models for representing multi-modal data distributions, with numerous applications in data mining, pattern recognition, data simulation, and machine learning. However, recent…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hang Liu , Anna Scaglione , Sean Peisert

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Bogdan Mazoure , Riashat Islam

Orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF) has become a standard approach for clustering. As far as we know, most works on ONMF rely on the Frobenius norm to assess the quality of the approximation. This paper presents a new model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-06 Jean Pacifique Nkurunziza , Fulgence Nahayo , Nicolas Gillis

We propose a method to fuse posterior distributions learned from heterogeneous datasets. Our algorithm relies on a mean field assumption for both the fused model and the individual dataset posteriors and proceeds using a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Sebastian Claici , Mikhail Yurochkin , Soumya Ghosh , Justin Solomon

We consider model-based reinforcement learning in finite Markov De- cision Processes (MDPs), focussing on so-called optimistic strategies. In MDPs, optimism can be implemented by carrying out extended value it- erations under a constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-22 Sarah Filippi , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

Generative models frequently suffer miscalibration, wherein statistics of the sampling distribution, such as the fraction of generations in a given class, deviate from desired values. We frame calibration as a constrained optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-29 Henry D. Smith , Nathaniel L. Diamant , Brian L. Trippe

In statistical classification/multiple hypothesis testing and machine learning, a model distribution estimated from the training data is usually applied to replace the unknown true distribution in the Bayes decision rule, which introduces a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zijian Yang , Vahe Eminyan , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

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

We study the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence approximation theory of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) by isolating an abstract mechanism behind several necessary-and-sufficient statements. The necessity direction is universal: if a density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Hien Duy Nguyen

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