Information Projection on Banach spaces with Applications to State Independent KL-Weighted Optimal Control (2009.03504v3)

Abstract: This paper studies constrained information projections on Banach spaces with respect to a Gaussian reference measure. Specifically our interest lies in characterizing projections of the reference measure, with respect to the KL-divergence, onto sets of measures corresponding to changes in the mean (or {\it shift measures}). As our main result, we give a portmanteau theorem that characterizes the relationship among several different formulations of this problem. In the general setting of Gaussian measures on a Banach space, we show that this information projection problem is equivalent to minimization of a certain Onsager-Machlup (OM) function with respect to an associated stochastic process. We then construct several reformulations in the more specific setting of classical Wiener space. First, we show that KL-weighted optimization over shift measures can also be expressed in terms of an OM function for an associated stochastic process that we are able to characterize. Next, we show how to encode the feasible set of shift measures through an explicit functional constraint by constructing an appropriate penalty function. Finally, we express our information projection problem as a calculus of variations problem, which suggests a solution procedure via the Euler-Lagrange equation. We work out the details of these reformulations for several specific examples.