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Related papers: The Wasserstein Proximal Gradient Algorithm

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This paper considers the problem of regression over distributions, which is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. Existing approaches often ignore the geometry of the probability space or are computationally expensive. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Maksim Maslov , Alexander Kugaevskikh , Matthew Ivanov

The computation of Wasserstein gradient direction is essential for posterior sampling problems and scientific computing. The approximation of the Wasserstein gradient with finite samples requires solving a variational problem. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Mert Pilanci , Wuchen Li

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Eloi Tanguy

Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF) with respect to specific functionals have been widely used in the machine learning literature. Recently, neural networks have been adopted to approximate certain intractable parts of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Huminhao Zhu , Fangyikang Wang , Chao Zhang , Hanbin Zhao , Hui Qian

We introduce a time discretization for Wasserstein gradient flows based on the classical Backward Differentiation Formula of order two. The main building block of the scheme is the notion of geodesic extrapolation in the Wasserstein space,…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2023-11-20 Thomas Gallouët , Andrea Natale , Gabriele Todeschi

We provide a numerical analysis and computation of neural network projected schemes for approximating one dimensional Wasserstein gradient flows. We approximate the Lagrangian mapping functions of gradient flows by the class of two-layer…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-27 Xinzhe Zuo , Jiaxi Zhao , Shu Liu , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

This study focuses on a Wasserstein-type gradient flow, which represents an optimization process of a continuous model of a Deep Neural Network (DNN). First, we establish the existence of a minimizer for an average loss of the model under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Noboru Isobe

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

Optimal transport is a foundational problem in optimization, that allows to compare probability distributions while taking into account geometric aspects. Its optimal objective value, the Wasserstein distance, provides an important loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Marin Ballu , Quentin Berthet , Francis Bach

We introduce a novel discretization scheme for Wasserstein gradient flows that involves successively computing Schr\"{o}dinger bridges with the same marginals. This is different from both the forward/geodesic approximation and the…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-06-18 Medha Agarwal , Zaid Harchaoui , Garrett Mulcahy , Soumik Pal

We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Wuchen Li

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

We study policy gradient methods for continuous-action, entropy-regularized reinforcement learning through the lens of Wasserstein geometry. Starting from a Wasserstein proximal update, we derive Wasserstein Proximal Policy Gradient (WPPG)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Zhaoyu Zhu , Shuhan Zhang , Rui Gao , Shuang Li

As a counterpoint to recent numerical methods for crystal surface evolution, which agree well with microscopic dynamics but suffer from significant stiffness that prevents simulation on fine spatial grids, we develop a new numerical method…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Katy Craig , Jian-Guo Liu , Jianfeng Lu , Jeremy L. Marzuola , Li Wang

Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs) describe the evolution of probability distributions in Wasserstein space as steepest descent dynamics for a free energy functional. Computing the full path from an arbitrary initial distribution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chengyu Liu , Xiang Zhou

Many studies have been conducted on flows of probability measures, often in terms of gradient flows. We utilize a generalized notion of derivatives with respect to time to model the instantaneous evolution of empirically observed…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-16 Yaqing Chen , Hans-Georg Müller

We construct an efficient primal-dual forward-backward (PDFB) splitting method for computing a class of minimizing movement schemes with nonlinear mobility transport distances, and apply it to computing Wasserstein-like gradient flows. This…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-04-18 Yunhong Deng , Li Wang , Chaozhen Wei

Many machine learning problems can be seen as approximating a \textit{target} distribution using a \textit{particle} distribution by minimizing their statistical discrepancy. Wasserstein Gradient Flow can move particles along a path that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-07 Song Liu , Jiahao Yu , Jack Simons , Mingxuan Yi , Mark Beaumont

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

Optimization is at the heart of machine learning, statistics and many applied scientific disciplines. It also has a long history in physics, ranging from the minimal action principle to finding ground states of disordered systems such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-11 Guilherme França , Daniel P. Robinson , René Vidal