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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

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 (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

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

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

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

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

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

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

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

In the loss function of Variational Autoencoders there is a well known tension between two components: the reconstruction loss, improving the quality of the resulting images, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, acting as a regularizer of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Andrea Asperti , Matteo Trentin

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

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

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

We derive the Kullback-Leibler divergence for the normal-gamma distribution and show that it is identical to the Bayesian complexity penalty for the univariate general linear model with conjugate priors. Based on this finding, we provide…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-07 Joram Soch , Carsten Allefeld

Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Taiqiang Wu , Chaofan Tao , Jiahao Wang , Runming Yang , Zhe Zhao , Ngai Wong

Training generative models to sample from unnormalized density functions is an important and challenging task in machine learning. Traditional training methods often rely on the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Jiajun He , Wenlin Chen , Mingtian Zhang , David Barber , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Modern machine learning approaches excel in static settings where a large amount of i.i.d. training data are available for a given task. In a dynamic environment, though, an intelligent agent needs to be able to transfer knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Jonas Wildberger , Siyuan Guo , Arnab Bhattacharyya , Bernhard Schölkopf

One of the challenges in training generative models such as the variational auto encoder (VAE) is avoiding posterior collapse. When the generator has too much capacity, it is prone to ignoring latent code. This problem is exacerbated when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Talip Ucar