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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

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

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

We examine the estimation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the use of the goodness-of-fit test for multivariate continuous distributions. Our starting point is the maximum entropy principle for Shannon entropy: among all…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Mehmet Siddik Cadirci , Martin Singull

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

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

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…

Recent research has revealed that deep generative models including flow-based models and Variational Autoencoders may assign higher likelihoods to out-of-distribution (OOD) data than in-distribution (ID) data. However, we cannot sample OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Yufeng Zhang , Jialu Pan , Wanwei Liu , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang , Zhiming Liu , Kenli Li , Hongmei Wei

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

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

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 consider estimating the predictive density under Kullback-Leibler loss in a high-dimensional Gaussian model. Decision theoretic properties of the within-family prediction error -- the minimal risk among estimates in the class…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-12-04 Gourab Mukherjee , Iain M. Johnstone

In this work, we investigate Gaussian Mixture Models ({\it abbrv} GMM) and the related problem of non parametric maximum likelihood estimation ({\it abbrv} NPMLE) from the perspective of statistical mechanics. In particular, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-25 Subhroshekhar Ghosh , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Satyaki Mukherjee , Hoang-Son Tran

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

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

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

We study the gradient flow for a relaxed approximation to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between a moving source and a fixed target distribution. This approximation, termed the KALE (KL approximate lower-bound estimator), solves a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-01 Pierre Glaser , Michael Arbel , Arthur Gretton

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

Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that revolve around the estimation of the score function associated with a stochastic differential equation. Subsequent to its acquisition, the approximated score function is then…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Giovanni Conforti , Alain Durmus , Marta Gentiloni Silveri

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
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