arXiv:2511.01064v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q$ in a family of tractable distributions. The best variational approximation is found by minimizing a divergence between distributions, $D(p||q)$, and several divergences have been proposed as objective functions for VI, with different choices leading to different approximations. We show that even when these divergences have different minimizers, the resulting approximations all abide by certain symmetry-matching principles. Specifically, our results hold f
Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.
