English

Neural solver for Wasserstein Geodesics and optimal transport dynamics

Machine Learning 2026-02-26 v1 Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

In recent years, the machine learning community has increasingly embraced the optimal transport (OT) framework for modeling distributional relationships. In this work, we introduce a sample-based neural solver for computing the Wasserstein geodesic between a source and target distribution, along with the associated velocity field. Building on the dynamical formulation of the optimal transport (OT) problem, we recast the constrained optimization as a minimax problem, using deep neural networks to approximate the relevant functions. This approach not only provides the Wasserstein geodesic but also recovers the OT map, enabling direct sampling from the target distribution. By estimating the OT map, we obtain velocity estimates along particle trajectories, which in turn allow us to learn the full velocity field. The framework is flexible and readily extends to general cost functions, including the commonly used quadratic cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22003,
  title  = {Neural solver for Wasserstein Geodesics and optimal transport dynamics},
  author = {Hailiang Liu and Yan-Han Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22003},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 22 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:52:14.086Z