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Related papers: Maximum Mean Discrepancy Gradient Flow

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The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a kernel-based distance between probability distributions useful in many applications (Gretton et al. 2012), bearing a simple estimator with pleasing computational and statistical properties. Being able…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Danica J. Sutherland , Namrata Deka

Comparing conditional distributions is a fundamental challenge in statistics and machine learning, with applications across a wide range of domains. While proposed methods for measuring discrepancies using kernel embeddings of distributions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Peter Moskvichev , Siu Lun Chau , Dino Sejdinovic

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has been widely employed to measure the distance between probability distributions. In this paper, we propose using MMD to solve continuous multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). For solving MOPs, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Hao Wang , Chenyu Shi , Angel E. Rodriguez-Fernandez , Oliver Schütze

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

We develop a geometric convergence theory for neural-network optimization within the minimizing movement scheme (MMS) framework. Reformulating each neural MMS step as a minimization over the set of increments in a Hilbert space, we show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Shixin Zheng , Yiwei Wang , Haizhao Yang

Distances between probability distributions are a key component of many statistical machine learning tasks, from two-sample testing to generative modeling, among others. We introduce a novel distance between measures that compares them…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Arturo Castellanos , Anna Korba , Pavlo Mozharovskyi , Hicham Janati

This paper presents a new gradient flow dissipation geometry over non-negative and probability measures. This is motivated by a principled construction that combines the unbalanced optimal transport and interaction forces modeled by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Egor Gladin , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Mielke , Jia-Jie Zhu

This paper characterizes the maximum mean discrepancies (MMD) that metrize the weak convergence of probability measures for a wide class of kernels. More precisely, we prove that, on a locally compact, non-compact, Hausdorff space, the MMD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Alessandro Barp , Bernhard Schölkopf , Lester Mackey

Comparing probability distributions is at the crux of many machine learning algorithms. Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Wasserstein distances are two classes of distances between probability distributions that have attracted abundant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Titouan Vayer , Rémi Gribonval

When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Alessandro Barp , Francois-Xavier Briol , Andrew B. Duncan , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

What is the optimal way to approximate a high-dimensional diffusion process by one in which the coordinates are independent? This paper presents a construction, called the \emph{independent projection}, which is optimal for two natural…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-10 Daniel Lacker

We reveal a precise mathematical framework about a new family of generative models which we call Gradient Flow Drifting. With this framework, we prove an equivalence between the recently proposed Drifting Model and the Wasserstein gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jiarui Cao , Zixuan Wei , Yuxin Liu

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

Assume that we observe i.i.d.~points lying close to some unknown $d$-dimensional $\mathcal{C}^k$ submanifold $M$ in a possibly high-dimensional space. We study the problem of reconstructing the probability distribution generating the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Vincent Divol

Maximum mean discrepancies (MMDs) like the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) have grown central to a wide range of applications, including hypothesis testing, sampler selection, distribution approximation, and variational inference. In each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Alessandro Barp , Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has been widely adopted in domain adaptation to measure the discrepancy between the source and target domain distributions. Many existing domain adaptation approaches are based on the joint MMD, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Wen Zhang , Dongrui Wu

Distances between probability distributions that take into account the geometry of their sample space,like the Wasserstein or the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) distances have received a lot of attention in machine learning as they can, for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Gaëtan Hadjeres , Frank Nielsen

The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is a widely used multivariate distance metric for two-sample testing. The standard MMD test statistic has an intractable null distribution typically requiring costly resampling or permutation approaches…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Anirban Chatterjee , Aaditya Ramdas

This paper studies minimax optimization problems defined over infinite-dimensional function classes of overparameterized two-layer neural networks. In particular, we consider the minimax optimization problem stemming from estimating linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yuchen Zhu , Yufeng Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Xiaohong Chen

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-05 Yuling Yan , Kaizheng Wang , Philippe Rigollet