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Many applications in machine learning involve data represented as probability distributions. The emergence of such data requires radically novel techniques to design tractable gradient flows on probability distributions over this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Clément Bonet , Christophe Vauthier , Anna Korba

Recently, optimization on the Riemannian manifold have provided valuable insights to the optimization community. In this regard, extending these methods to to the Wasserstein space is of particular interest, since optimization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Mingyang Yi , Bohan Wang

Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

We introduce a new method for training generative adversarial networks by applying the Wasserstein-2 metric proximal on the generators. The approach is based on Wasserstein information geometry. It defines a parametrization invariant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Alex Tong Lin , Wuchen Li , Stanley Osher , Guido Montufar

We study the problem of estimating a sequence of evolving probability distributions from historical data, where the underlying distribution changes over time in a nonstationary and nonparametric manner. To capture gradual changes, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Edward J. Anderson , Dominic S. T. Keehan

Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

This manuscript introduces a regression-type formulation for approximating the Perron-Frobenius Operator by relying on distributional snapshots of data. These snapshots may represent densities of particles. The Wasserstein metric is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Amirhossein Karimi , Tryphon T. Georgiou

The Wasserstein distance is a metric on a space of probability measures that has seen a surge of applications in statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. However, statistical aspects of Wasserstein distances are bottlenecked…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-03-02 Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato , Sloan Nietert , Gabriel Rioux

It is well-known that many diffusion equations can be recast as Wasserstein gradient flows. Moreover, in recent years, by modifying the Wasserstein distance appropriately, this technique has been transferred to further evolution equations…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-10-15 Kaveh Bashiri , Anton Bovier

The $E$-optimality criterion for a regression model maximizes the smallest eigenvalue of the information matrix and becomes non-differentiable when this eigenvalue has multiplicity greater than one. Working in the $2$-Wasserstein space, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Jieling Shi , Kim-Chuan Toh , Xin T. Tong , Weng Kee Wong

The Wasserstein barycenter extends the Euclidean mean to the space of probability measures by minimizing the weighted sum of squared 2-Wasserstein distances. We develop a free-support algorithm for computing Wasserstein barycenters that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-17 Kisung You

Optimal transport distances are powerful tools to compare probability distributions and have found many applications in machine learning. Yet their algorithmic complexity prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Kilian Fatras , Younes Zine , Rémi Flamary , Rémi Gribonval , Nicolas Courty

The Wasserstein distance on multivariate non-degenerate Gaussian densities is a Riemannian distance. After reviewing the properties of the distance and the metric geodesic, we present an explicit form of the Riemannian metrics on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-09-25 Luigi Malagò , Luigi Montrucchio , Giovanni Pistone

Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-11 Rentian Yao , Yun Yang

A common feature of methods for analyzing samples of probability density functions is that they respect the geometry inherent to the space of densities. Once a metric is specified for this space, the Fr\'echet mean is typically used to…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-20 Alexander Petersen , Hans-Georg Müller

We compute the ground state $u$ of the Gross--Pitaevskii equation (GPE) via Wasserstein gradient descent in diffeomorphism space. We represent the density $\rho=u^2$ as the push-forward of a fixed reference measure through a parameterized…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Xiangxiong Zhang , Haomin Zhou

We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Jiangze Han , Christopher Thomas Ryan , Xin T. Tong

Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Eduardo Fernandes Montesuma , Yassir Bendou , Mike Gartrell

Uncertainty propagation and filtering can be interpreted as gradient flows with respect to suitable metrics in the infinite dimensional manifold of probability density functions. Such a viewpoint has been put forth in recent literature, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-10-31 Abhishek Halder , Tryphon T. Georgiou

In this paper, we propose a novel numerical scheme to optimize the gradient flows for learning energy-based models (EBMs). From a perspective of physical simulation, we redefine the problem of approximating the gradient flow utilizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yang Wu , Pengxu Wei , Liang Lin