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Most prior work on the convergence of gradient descent (GD) for overparameterized neural networks relies on strong assumptions on the step size (infinitesimal), the hidden-layer width (infinite), or the initialization (large, spectral,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ziqing Xu , Hancheng Min , Salma Tarmoun , Enrique Mallada , Rene Vidal

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the local behavior of gradient descent and stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Sebastian Kassing , Thomas Kruse

The optimal transportation problem defines a geometry of probability measures which leads to a definition for weighted averages (barycenters) of measures, finding application in the machine learning and computer vision communities as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 David Gentile , James M. Murphy

There are much recent interests in solving noncovnex min-max optimization problems due to its broad applications in many areas including machine learning, networked resource allocations, and distributed optimization. Perhaps, the most…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Thinh T. Doan

When training neural networks with low-precision computation, rounding errors often cause stagnation or are detrimental to the convergence of the optimizers; in this paper we study the influence of rounding errors on the convergence of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-22 Lu Xia , Michiel E. Hochstenbach , Stefano Massei

We present a stochastic algorithm to compute the barycenter of a set of probability distributions under the Wasserstein metric from optimal transport. Unlike previous approaches, our method extends to continuous input distributions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sebastian Claici , Edward Chien , Justin Solomon

Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-15 Oscar Smee , Fred Roosta , Stephen J. Wright

Computing the unregularized Wasserstein barycenter for measure-valued data is a challenging optimization task. Recent algorithms have been tailored to either discrete measures as point clouds or continuous measures discretized on regular…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Peng Xu , Changbo Zhu , Xiaohui Chen

Let $\mathcal{P}_{2,ac}$ be the set of Borel probabilities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with finite second moment and absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. We consider the problem of finding the barycenter (or Fr\'echet mean) of a…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-25 Pedro C. Álvarez-Esteban , E. del Barrio , J. A. Cuesta-Albertos , C. Matrán

Wasserstein barycenters define averages of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. Their use is increasingly popular in applied fields, such as image, geometry or language processing. In these fields however, the probability…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-03-13 Guillaume Carlier , Alex Delalande , Quentin Merigot

We introduce weak barycenters of a family of probability distributions, based on the recently developed notion of optimal weak transport of mass by Gozlanet al. (2017) and Backhoff-Veraguas et al. (2020). We provide a theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-13 Elsa Cazelles , Felipe Tobar , Joaquín Fontbona

We study the decentralized distributed computation of discrete approximations for the regularized Wasserstein barycenter of a finite set of continuous probability measures distributedly stored over a network. We assume there is a network of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-21 Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Gasnikov , César A. Uribe , Angelia Nedić

This paper shows that error bounds can be used as effective tools for deriving complexity results for first-order descent methods in convex minimization. In a first stage, this objective led us to revisit the interplay between error bounds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-21 Jérôme Bolte , Trong Phong Nguyen , Juan Peypouquet , Bruce Suter

The Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality is a sufficient condition for establishing linear convergence of gradient descent, even in non-convex settings. While several recent works use a PL-based analysis to establish linear convergence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin , Caroline Uhler

Discrete Wasserstein barycenters correspond to optimal solutions of transportation problems for a set of probability measures with finite support. Discrete barycenters are measures with finite support themselves and exhibit two favorable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-24 Steffen Borgwardt

The Wasserstein barycenter problem seeks a probability measure that minimizes the weighted average of the Wasserstein distances to a given collection of probability measures. We study the discrete setting, where each measure has finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Jiaqi Wang , Weijun Xie

We present new algorithms to compute the mean of a set of empirical probability measures under the optimal transport metric. This mean, known as the Wasserstein barycenter, is the measure that minimizes the sum of its Wasserstein distances…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-06-18 Marco Cuturi , Arnaud Doucet

Optimization over the space of probability measures endowed with the Wasserstein-2 geometry is central to modern machine learning and mean-field modeling. However, traditional methods relying on full Wasserstein gradients often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Yewei Xu , Qin Li

Wasserstein barycenters provide a geometric notion of the weighted average of probability measures based on optimal transport. In this paper, we present a scalable algorithm to compute Wasserstein-2 barycenters given sample access to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-02 Alexander Korotin , Lingxiao Li , Justin Solomon , Evgeny Burnaev

The proximal algorithm is a powerful tool to minimize nonlinear and nonsmooth functionals in a general metric space. Motivated by the recent progress in studying the training dynamics of the noisy gradient descent algorithm on two-layer…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Shuailong Zhu , Xiaohui Chen