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In this paper, we investigate the multi-marginal Schrodinger bridge (MSB) problem whose marginal constraints are marginal distributions of a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a constant diffusion coefficient, and with time…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Rentian Yao , Young--Heon Kim , Geoffrey Schiebinger

We consider the problem to steer a linear dynamical system with full state observation from an initial gaussian distribution in state-space to a final one with minimum energy control. The system is stochastically driven through the control…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Yongxin Chen , Tryphon Georgiou , Michele Pavon

The LogSumExp function, dual to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, plays a central role in many important optimization problems, including entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-04 Egor Gladin , Alexey Kroshnin , Jia-Jie Zhu , Pavel Dvurechensky

We show that the minimum effort control of colloidal self-assembly can be naturally formulated in the order-parameter space as a generalized Schr\"{o}dinger bridge problem -- a class of fixed-horizon stochastic optimal control problems that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-17 Iman Nodozi , Charlie Yan , Mira Khare , Abhishek Halder , Ali Mesbah

We study the problem of model selection type aggregation with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence for various probabilistic models. Rather than considering a convex combination of the initial estimators $f_1, \ldots, f_N$, our…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-01-22 Cristina Butucea , Jean-François Delmas , Anne Dutfoy , Richard Fischer

We study the least-energy way to reshape a probability distribution when motion is constrained to a horizontal bundle, that is, optimal transport and distribution steering in sub-Riemannian geometry, motivated by density control over…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Daniel Owusu Adu , Karthik Elamvazhuthi , Bahman Gharesifard

This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Song Fang , Quanyan Zhu

The Schr\"odinger bridge problem (SBP) is gaining increasing attention in generative modeling and showing promising potential even in comparison with the score-based generative models (SGMs). SBP can be interpreted as an entropy-regularized…

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

Sampling in score-based diffusion models can be performed by solving either a reverse-time stochastic differential equation (SDE) parameterized by an arbitrary time-dependent stochasticity parameter or a probability flow ODE, corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Bernardo P. Schaeffer , Ricardo M. S. Rosa , Glauco Valle

This paper presents approaches to mean-field control, motivated by distributed control of multi-agent systems. Control solutions are based on a convex optimization problem, whose domain is a convex set of probability mass functions (pmfs).…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-12 Neil Cammardella , Ana Bušić , Sean Meyn

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), as a popular method to train robust models against distribution shift between training and test sets, has received tremendous attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose and analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Qi Qi , Jiameng Lyu , Kung sik Chan , Er Wei Bai , Tianbao Yang

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

The maximum entropy principle is a powerful tool for solving underdetermined inverse problems. This paper considers the problem of discretizing a continuous distribution, which arises in various applied fields. We obtain the approximating…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-05 Ken'ichiro Tanaka , Alexis Akira Toda

Consider the problem of matching two independent i.i.d. samples of size $N$ from two distributions $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. For an arbitrary continuous cost function, the optimal assignment problem looks for the matching that…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-01-03 Zaid Harchaoui , Lang Liu , Soumik Pal

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a foundational measure for comparing probability distributions. Yet in multivariate settings, its single value often obscures the underlying reasons for divergence, conflating mismatches in individual…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-06 William Cook

We consider the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge problem in discrete time, where the pathwise cost is replaced by a sum of quadratic functions, taking the form of a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) cost. This cost comprises potential terms that act…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Marc Lambert

Diffusion bridges are a promising class of deep-learning methods for sampling from unnormalized distributions. Recent works show that the Log Variance (LV) loss consistently outperforms the reverse Kullback-Leibler (rKL) loss when using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sebastian Sanokowski , Lukas Gruber , Christoph Bartmann , Sepp Hochreiter , Sebastian Lehner

The purpose of the present work is to expand substantially the type of control and estimation problems that can be addressed following the paradigm of Schr\"odinger bridges, by incorporating termination (killing) of stochastic flows.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-24 Asmaa Eldesoukey , Olga Movilla Miangolarra , Tryphon T. Georgiou