Related papers: KL Divergence Between Gaussians: A Step-by-Step De…

Overfitting data is a well-known phenomenon related with the generation of a model that mimics too closely (or exactly) a particular instance of data, and may therefore fail to predict future observations reliably. In practice, this…

In this paper we study algorithms to find a Gaussian approximation to a target measure defined on a Hilbert space of functions; the target measure itself is defined via its density with respect to a reference Gaussian measure. We employ the…

Calibration is a common experimental physics problem, whose goal is to infer the value and uncertainty of an unobservable quantity Z given a measured quantity X. Additionally, one would like to quantify the extent to which X and Z are…

Mutual Information (MI) is a fundamental measure of statistical dependence widely used in representation learning. While direct optimization of MI via its definition as a Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) is often intractable, many recent…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular deep latent variable model used to analyse high-dimensional datasets by learning a low-dimensional latent representation of the data. It simultaneously learns a generative model and an…

Many policy optimization approaches in reinforcement learning incorporate a Kullback-Leilbler (KL) divergence to the previous policy, to prevent the policy from changing too quickly. This idea was initially proposed in a seminal paper on…

This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…

A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…

We generalise the classical Pinsker inequality which relates variational divergence to Kullback-Liebler divergence in two ways: we consider arbitrary f-divergences in place of KL divergence, and we assume knowledge of a sequence of values…

We present a derivation of the Kullback Leibler (KL)-Divergence (also known as Relative Entropy) for the von Mises Fisher (VMF) Distribution in $d$-dimensions.

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…

Latent variables (LVs) play a crucial role in encoder-decoder models by enabling effective data compression, prediction, and generation. Although their theoretical properties, such as generalization, have been extensively studied in…

For training an encoder network to perform amortized variational inference, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the exact posterior to its approximation, known as the inclusive or forward KL, is an increasingly popular choice of…

We construct optimal low-rank approximations for the Gaussian posterior distribution in linear Gaussian inverse problems with possibly infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert parameter spaces and finite-dimensional data spaces. We first…

We derive a closed form solution for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two Weibull distributions. These notes are meant as reference material and intended to provide a guided tour towards a result that is often mentioned but seldom…

Recent advances in deep learning have brought to the fore models that can make multiple computational steps in the service of completing a task; these are capable of describ- ing long-term dependencies in sequential data. Novel recurrent…

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…

Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…

Recurrent Variational Autoencoder has been widely used for language modeling and text generation tasks. These models often face a difficult optimization problem, also known as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) term vanishing issue, where the…

To characterize the Kullback-Leibler divergence and Fisher information in general parametrized hidden Markov models, in this paper, we first show that the log likelihood and its derivatives can be represented as an additive functional of a…