Convergence Properties of Natural Gradient Descent for Minimizing KL Divergence

Abstract

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the choice of parameterization significantly impacts convergence. In this work, we study the problem of minimizing the KL divergence and analyze the behavior of gradient-based optimization algorithms under two dual coordinate systems within the framework of information geometry$-$ the exponential family ($θ$ coordinates) and the mixture family ($η$ coordinates). We compare Euclidean gradient descent (GD) in these coordinates with the coordinate-invariant natural gradient descent (NGD), where the natural gradient is a Riemannian gradient that incorporates the intrinsic geometry of the underlying statistical model. In continuous time, we prove that the convergence rates of GD in the $θ$ and $η$ coordinates provide lower and upper bounds, respectively, on the convergence rate of NGD. Moreover, under affine reparameterizations of the dual coordinates, the convergence rates of GD in $η$ and $θ$ coordinates can be scaled to $2c$ and $\frac{2}{c}$, respectively, for any $c>0$, while NGD maintains a fixed convergence rate of $2$, remaining invariant to such transformations and sandwiched between them. Although this suggests that NGD may not exhibit uniformly superior convergence in continuous time, we demonstrate that its advantages become pronounced in discrete time, where it achieves faster convergence and greater robustness to noise, outperforming GD. Our analysis hinges on bounding the spectrum and condition number of the Hessian of the KL divergence at the optimum, which coincides with the Fisher information matrix.