On the Properties of Kullback-Leibler Divergence Between Multivariate Gaussian Distributions

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 $n$-dimensional Gaussian distributions $\mathcal{N}_1$ and $\mathcal{N}_2$, we give the supremum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)$ when $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_1)\leq \varepsilon\ (\varepsilon>0)$. For small $\varepsilon$, we show that the supremum is $\varepsilon + 2\varepsilon^{1.5} + O(\varepsilon^2)$. This quantifies the approximate symmetry of small KL divergence between Gaussians. We also find the infimum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)$ when $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_1)\geq M\ (M>0)$. We give the conditions when the supremum and infimum can be attained. Second, for any three $n$-dimensional Gaussians $\mathcal{N}_1$, $\mathcal{N}_2$, and $\mathcal{N}_3$, we find an upper bound of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_3)$ if $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)\leq \varepsilon_1$ and $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_3)\leq \varepsilon_2$ for $\varepsilon_1,\varepsilon_2\ge 0$. For small $\varepsilon_1$ and $\varepsilon_2$, we show the upper bound is $3\varepsilon_1+3\varepsilon_2+2\sqrt{\varepsilon_1\varepsilon_2}+o(\varepsilon_1)+o(\varepsilon_2)$. This reveals that KL divergence between Gaussians follows a relaxed triangle inequality. Importantly, all the bounds in the theorems presented in this paper are independent of the dimension $n$. Finally, We discuss the applications of our theorems in explaining counterintuitive phenomenon of flow-based model, deriving deep anomaly detection algorithm, and extending one-step robustness guarantee to multiple steps in safe reinforcement learning.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer 8dDm6/10 · confidence 3/52023-06-19

Summary

This paper explores and proves some properties of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. One of the motivations is that as a statistical distance, KL divergence does not satisfy the properties of a metric, that is, symmetry and triangle inequality. In spite of these issues, this paper proposes the relaxed versions. To be specific, it proves the lower bound (resp. upper bound) for reverse KL divergence given the lower bound (resp. upper bound) of forward KL divergence, and the summation upper bound of two bounded KL divergences. Finally, the proposed techniques are applied to anomaly detection with flow based model and reinforcement learning.

Strengths

(1) This paper proves the lower bound (resp. upper bound) for reverse KL divergence given the lower bound (resp. upper bound) of forward KL divergence, and the summation upper bound of two bounded KL divergences. (2) The theoretical results can be applied to some applications in deep learning and reinforcement learning. (3) This paper is well-written and easy to understand.

Weaknesses

(1) Theorem 1 and Theorem 3 hold when two conditions are satisfied. For example, for the mean, it requires $\mu_1 = \mu_2$, which is too strong in practice. (2) Since the KL divergence has a wide range of applications, the two applications shown in this paper are kind of limited and not convincing.

Questions

The KL divergence is widely used in machine learning and statistics, etc. Can the theoretical results in this paper be used to some other tasks in machine learning?

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

See Weaknesses.

Reviewer ZfdJ6/10 · confidence 3/52023-06-22

Summary

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is an important measure of distance between probability distributions with uses in statistics, information theory and many other fields. However, it is not a proper distance measure, since it is not symmetric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality in general. The authors consider the KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions and show that a relaxed notion of symmetry and triangle inequality holds under certain conditions. Specifically, they formulate an upper bound on KL(N2,N1) when KL(N1,N2) < epsilon, and show that it cannot be much greater than epsilon. Similarly, they give a lower bound on KL(N2,N1) when KL(N1,N2) > M. Finally, they upper bound KL(N1,N3) when KL(N1,N2) < epsilon1 and KL(N2,N3) < epsilon2. They conclude by discussing several applications of the results in deep learning and reinforcement learning.

Strengths

The disadvantages of KL divergence as far as symmetry and triangle inequality go are well known, so finding conditions in which even a relaxed version of these properties hold is interesting and potentially useful.

Weaknesses

Firstly, due to the continuity of the KL divergence around epsilon=0 (N1=N2), the results are not too surprising. The proofs are technical, lengthy and somewhat repetitive. Lemma G.5 in particular is not so digestible for readers. Secondly, the structure of the paper is unorthodox: usually you would have the Related Work section right after the Introduction instead of before Conclusions; that would also be a better place to start mentioning the applications for which your results might be relevant. The section called Lemmas and Notations has no lemmas. The Applications section should be called Discussion.

Questions

- Can you please rearrange the structure of the paper to be more in line with convention? - Can Lemma G.5 be made more edible, or could a more informative overview be given? -- The authors have thoroughly addressed these points in the rebuttal.

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

2 fair

Contribution

2 fair

Limitations

There is no potential negative societal impact of the work

Reviewer odZe7/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-06

Summary

This paper investigates the properties of KL divergence between Gaussian distributions. The main theoretical contributions include two main theorems. The first one gives the supremum of reverse KL divergence between Gaussians when the forward KL divergence is bounded. The conditions when the supremum is attained are also identified. The second theorem gives the relaxed triangle inequality of KL divergence between Gaussians. Based on these two main theorems, this paper also derives several corollaries, including the local approximations and a lower bound of reverse KL divergence. It is also notable that the bounds are dimension-free. Finally, this paper discusses several applications of the theoretical results in OOD detection with flow-based generative models and safe/robust reinforcement learning. Overall, the research questions studied in this paper have not been answered before. The theoretical contributions of this paper are novel and solid. The proofs are carefully written and correct. Notably, the proof of Theorem 4 is rather technical. The theorems presented in this paper can be applied in various contexts involving KL divergence and Gaussian distributions.

Strengths

1. The problems studied in this paper are novel and interesting. This paper answers these research problems for the first time. 2. The proofs, which are based on the Lambert W function, are technical. 3. The theoretical results can be applied to various problems, including anomaly detection and reinforcement learning. These results also have other potential applications.

Weaknesses

1. It is possible to make some equations tighter by introducing notations earlier. For example, notations in Equations (G.146)-(G.150) can be introduced earlier to make Equations (G.128)-(G.144) more concise. 2. The derivations in Equation (E.54) and (J.193) are over-detailed. These two equations can be shortened.

Questions

See Weaknesses.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

The authors have discussed social impacts and limitations.

Reviewer rMwu7/10 · confidence 3/52023-07-06

Summary

In this paper, the authors look at the KL divergence between two multivarite Gaussian distributions. The KL divergence is an important distance function between two distributions. However, it lacks certain nice properties that other metric distance functions such as variation distance satisfies: namely, symmetry and triangle inequality. This paper shows that, nevertheless, KL divergence satisfies an approximate version of these two important properties. Specifically, if one of the KL divergences is small then the reverse KL divergence will also be small. Similarly, if two pairs of distributions have small KL divergences between them, then the remaining pair will also have a small KL divergence in between. The results are derived by posing this as an optimization problem that minimizes the unknown KL divergences subject to the constraint that the known KL divergences are small. Then certain relevant functions such as and are analyzed to derive an upper bound for the above optimization problems. Finally, the authors argue that such approximate symmetry and approximate triangle inequality appear in several important practical applications. In fact, they mention one such problem involving deep neural networks that led them to study this question. One more application of this result is that learning a multivariate Gaussian in either KL gives a similar learning result for the reverse KL. So far algorithms have been derived separately for the two directions, see [arXiv:1710.05209] and [arXiv:2107.10450] for more. I have not carefully checked the mathematical details.

Strengths

The paper works on a fundamental mathematical problem of proving that KL divergence between multivariate Gaussians is almost a metric near 0. and gives a nice solution. This paper is very nicely written and a pleasure to read. This is really a beautiful paper.

Weaknesses

None.

Questions

None.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

None.

Reviewer azx27/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-07

Summary

In this paper, the authors prove the following interesting mathematical properties of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions, while the KL divergence is not a proper distance (in sense that it is not symmetric) and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, but: 1. if $KL(N_2||N_1) \leq \epsilon$ then it can be shown that the supremum of $KL(N_1||N_2) $ can be upper bounded by some explicit function of $\epsilon$ that is of order $\epsilon$ for $\epsilon$ small, so that the KL is approximately symmetric in the Gaussian case when being close; and 2. an infimum of $KL(N_1||N_2) $ is also derived for $KL(N_2||N_1) \geq M$; and 2. for three Gaussian $N_1, N_2, N_3$, one has an upper bound $KL(N_1||N_3) $ that verifies the triangle inequality up to a factor of three, again when the three Gaussians are close. The authors discuss the basic proof ideas and some possibly applications in Section 5.

Strengths

This paper focuses on the fundamental theoretical properties of Kullback-Leibler divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions, that, to the best of my knowledge, are novel, and have wide applications in ML. I've not checked the detailed proofs, but the proof sketch looks compelling. The proof idea is very interesting and may be of independent interest.

Weaknesses

The paper is in good shape, I do not have specific concern to raise.

Questions

1. The authors mention that they propose an unified OOD detection algorithm KLODS, but no detail about KLODS is given, it would be great if the authors could elaborate more on this.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

4 excellent

Presentation

4 excellent

Contribution

4 excellent

Limitations

This paper is primarily of theoretical nature, and I do not see any potential negative societal impact of this work.

Reviewer azx22023-08-11

Thanks for the comments, I have read the rebuttal.

Reviewer ZfdJ2023-08-11

Answer to rebuttal

I have read the authors response and consider my concerns addressed. The paper grading was updated accordingly.

Reviewer odZe2023-08-21

I have read the response and appreciate the contributions of this paper. The theoretical contributions of this paper are novel and solid. The proofs are carefully written and correct. I keep my accept recommendation.

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (poster)

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