Natural Gradient Descent

Natural Gradient Descent

Claim: Fisher Information Matrix \( \text{F} \) is the Hessian of KL-divergence between two distributions \( p(x \vert \theta) \) and \( p(x \vert \theta’) \), with respect to \( \theta’ \), evaluated at \( \theta’ = \theta \). Thus the only thing left is:

Now, we would like to know what is update vector \( d \) that minimizes the loss function \( \mathcal{L} (\theta) \) in distribution space, so that we know in which direction decreases the KL-divergence the most. If we write the above minimization in Lagrangian form, with constraint KL-divergence approximated by its second order Taylor series expansion and approximate \( \mathcal{L}(\theta + d) \) with its first order Taylor series expansion, we get:

To solve this minimization, we set its derivative wrt.

Source: wiseodd.github.io