Related papers: Autoregressive Learning in Joint KL: Sharp Oracle …

Transfer learning, or domain adaptation, is concerned with machine learning problems in which training and testing data come from possibly different probability distributions. In this work, we give an information-theoretic analysis of the…

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…

\emph{Kullback-Leibler} (KL) regularization is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning algorithms in the form of \emph{reverse} or \emph{forward} KL. Recent studies have demonstrated $\epsilon^{-1}$-type fast rates for decision making under…

Reverse-Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization has emerged to be a predominant technique used to enhance policy optimization in reinforcement learning (RL) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which forces the learned policy…

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

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…

Neural Network (Deep Learning) is a modern model in Artificial Intelligence and it has been exploited in Survival Analysis. Although several improvements have been shown by previous works, training an excellent deep learning model requires…

Empirical risk minimization, a cornerstone in machine learning, is often hindered by the Optimizer's Curse stemming from discrepancies between the empirical and true data-generating distributions.To address this challenge, the robust…

Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes…

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…

To ensure stability of learning, state-of-the-art generalized policy iteration algorithms augment the policy improvement step with a trust region constraint bounding the information loss. The size of the trust region is commonly determined…

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence has recently emerged as the preferred objective for large language model (LLM) distillation, consistently outperforming forward KL (FKL), particularly in regimes with large vocabularies and…

Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far.…

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…

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…

We consider the problem of estimating probability density functions based on sample data, using a finite mixture of densities from some component class. To this end, we introduce the $h$-lifted Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence as a…

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…

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

We establish two correspondences between reverse-mode automatic differentiation (backpropagation at a given forward-pass point) and compositions of projection maps in Kullback--Leibler (KL) geometry. In both settings, message passing…