A note on the unique properties of the Kullback--Leibler divergence for sampling via gradient flows

arXiv:2507.04330v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution pi which admits a density w.r.t. a dominating measure. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distributions in which we aim to minimise a divergence from pi. The optimisation problem is normally solved through gradient flows in the space of probability distributions with an appropriate metric. We show that the Kullback--Leibler divergence is the only divergence in the family of Bregman divergences whose gradient flow w.r.t. many popular metrics does not require knowledge of the normalising constant of pi.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-05-06