A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Rényi divergence is related to Rényi entropy much like Kullback-Leibler divergence is related to Shannon's entropy, and comes up in many settings. It was introduced by Rényi as a measure of information that satisfies almost the same axioms as Kullback-Leibler divergence, and depends on a parameter that is called its or…
This paper introduces the variational Rényi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to Rényi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth interpolation from the evidence lower-bound to the log (marginal) likelihood that is co…
Estimating divergences in a consistent way is of great importance in many machine learning tasks. Although this is a fundamental problem in nonparametric statistics, to the best of our knowledge there has been no finite sample exponential inequality convergence bound derived for any divergence estimators. The main cont…
This paper presents a novel theoretical study of the general problem of multiple source adaptation using the notion of Renyi divergence. Our results build on our previous work [12], but significantly broaden the scope of that work in several directions. We extend previous multiple source loss guarantees based on distri…
We consider nonparametric estimation of L2, Renyi-α and Tsallis-α divergences between continuous distributions. Our approach is to construct estimators for particular integral functionals of two densities and translate them into divergence estimators. For the integral functionals, our estimators are based on cor…
We derive the optimal differential privacy (DP) parameters of a mechanism that satisfies a given level of Rényi differential privacy (RDP). Our result is based on the joint range of two f-divergences that underlie the approximate and the Rényi variations of differential privacy. We apply our result to the moments acc…
Disagreement is an essential element of science and life in general. The language of probabilities and statistics is often used to describe disagreements quantitatively. In practice, however, we want much more than that. We want disagreements to be resolved. This leaves us with a substantial knowledge gap which is ofte…
Differential privacy is a de facto standard in data privacy, with applications in the public and private sectors. A way to explain differential privacy, which is particularly appealing to statistician and social scientists is by means of its statistical hypothesis testing interpretation. Informally, one cannot effectiv…
We study the asymptotic consistency properties of α-Rényi approximate posteriors, a class of variational Bayesian methods that approximate an intractable Bayesian posterior with a member of a tractable family of distributions, the member chosen to minimize the α-Rényi divergence from the true posterior. Unique to o…
For nonlinear supervised learning models, assessing the importance of predictor variables or their interactions is not straightforward because it can vary in the domain of the variables. Importance can be assessed locally with sensitivity analysis using general methods that rely on the model's predictions or their deri…
Improved privacy analysis for stochastic gradient descent.
problem Analyzing privacy leakage in noisy stochastic gradient descent.
method Modeling Rényi divergence dynamics with Langevin diffusions, proving exponential privacy loss convergence for smooth and strongly convex objectives.
result Privacy loss converges exponentially fast for smooth and strongly convex objectives under constant step size.
We propose a direct estimation method for Rényi and f-divergence measures based on a new graph theoretical interpretation. Suppose that we are given two sample sets X and Y, respectively with N and M samples, where η:=M/N is a constant value. Considering the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) graph of Y in the j…
This short note highlights some links between two lines of research within the emerging topic of trustworthy machine learning: differential privacy and robustness to adversarial examples. By abstracting the definitions of both notions, we show that they build upon the same theoretical ground and hence results obtained …