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Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lucas Monteiro Paes , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald , Federico Danieli

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…

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

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

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 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

Recently in [1, 2], Ali-Akbar Bromideh introduced the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) test statistic in discrim- inating between two models. It was found that the Ratio Minimized Kulback-Leibler Divergence (RMKLD) works better than the…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-02 Papa Ngom , Jean de Dieu Nkurunziza , Carlos Simplice Ogouyandjou

We propose an algorithm to estimate the path-gradient of both the reverse and forward Kullback-Leibler divergence for an arbitrary manifestly invertible normalizing flow. The resulting path-gradient estimators are straightforward to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Lorenz Vaitl , Kim A. Nicoli , Shinichi Nakajima , Pan Kessel

In this paper, we derive a useful lower bound for the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) based on the Hammersley-Chapman-Robbins bound (HCRB). The HCRB states that the variance of an estimator is bounded from below by the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Tomohiro Nishiyama

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

We study the minimax estimation of $\alpha$-divergences between discrete distributions for integer $\alpha\ge 1$, which include the Kullback--Leibler divergence and the $\chi^2$-divergences as special examples. Dropping the usual…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , Tsachy Weissman

Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) and unbiased estimators recently proposed by McLeish (Monte Carlo Methods Appl., 2011) and Rhee and Glynn (Oper. Res., 2015) are closely related. This connection is elaborated by presenting a new general class…

Computation · Statistics 2017-05-12 Matti Vihola

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

Information-theoretic measures such as the entropy, cross-entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two mixture models is a core primitive in many signal processing tasks. Since the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-01 Frank Nielsen , Ke Sun

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

Gradient estimation in models with discrete latent variables is a challenging problem, because the simplest unbiased estimators tend to have high variance. To counteract this, modern estimators either introduce bias, rely on multiple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-13 Max B. Paulus , Chris J. Maddison , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss to stabilize training and prevent overfitting. However, in methods such as GRPO, its implementation may be guided by principles from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Kezhao Liu , Jason Klein Liu , Mingtao Chen , Yiming 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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jiequan Cui , Beier Zhu , Qingshan Xu , Zhuotao Tian , Xiaojuan Qi , Bei Yu , Hanwang Zhang , Richang Hong

We employ a parameter-free distribution estimation framework where estimators are random distributions and utilize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as a loss function. Wu and Vos [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 142 (2012) 1525-1536] show…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-21 Paul Vos , Qiang Wu

Article discusses the application of Kullback-Leibler divergence to the recognition of speech signals and suggests three algorithms implementing this divergence criterion: correlation algorithm, spectral algorithm and filter algorithm.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Igor Bocharov , Pavel Lukin