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We develop structure preserving schemes for a class of nonlinear mobility continuity equation. When the mobility is a concave function, this equation admits a form of gradient flow with respect to a Wasserstein-like transport metric. Our…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Jose A. Carrillo , Li Wang , Chaozhen Wei

We analyze the gradient flow of a potential energy in the space of probability measures when we substitute the optimal transport geometry with a geometry based on Sinkhorn divergences, a debiased version of entropic optimal transport. This…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-19 Mathis Hardion , Hugo Lavenant

Gradient flows are a powerful tool for optimizing functionals in general metric spaces, including the space of probabilities endowed with the Wasserstein metric. A typical approach to solving this optimization problem relies on its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-02 David Alvarez-Melis , Yair Schiff , Youssef Mroueh

We modify the JKO scheme, which is a time discretization of Wasserstein gradient flows, by replacing the Wasserstein distance with more general transport costs on manifolds. We show when the cost function has a mixed Hessian which defines a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Cale Rankin , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) is a common method to perform optimization over the space of probability measures. While WGF is guaranteed to converge to a first-order stationary point, for nonconvex functionals the converged solution does…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Naoya Yamamoto , Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

We study the Wasserstein gradient flow of semi-discrete energies in the space of probability measures, that is functionals depending on two measures-one being an absolutely continuous density and the other an atomic measure. These energies…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Joao Miguel Machado

This paper presents a Wasserstein attraction approach for solving dynamic mass transport problems over networks. In the transport problem over networks, we start with a distribution over the set of nodes that needs to be "transported" to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-28 Ferran Arqué , César A. Uribe , Carlos Ocampo-Martinez

We propose a variational scheme for computing Wasserstein gradient flows. The scheme builds upon the Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto framework with the Benamou-Brenier's dynamic formulation of the quadratic Wasserstein metric and adds a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-07-15 Wuchen Li , Jianfeng Lu , Li Wang

We propose a Variable-Preconditioned Transformed Primal-Dual (VPTPD) method for solving generalized Wasserstein gradient flows based on the structure-preserving JKO scheme. This is a nontrivial extension of the TPD method [Chen et al.…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-10-22 Jin Zeng , Dawei Zhan , Ruchi Guo , Chaozhen Wei

This is an expository paper on the theory of gradient flows, and in particular of those PDEs which can be interpreted as gradient flows for the Wasserstein metric on the space of probability measures (a distance induced by optimal…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-09-14 Filippo Santambrogio

In this paper we devote our attention to a class of weighted ultrafast diffusion equations arising from the problem of quantisation for probability measures. These equations have a natural gradient flow structure in the space of probability…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2019-01-30 Mikaela Iacobelli , Francesco Patacchini , Filippo Santambrogio

Solving ill-posed inverse problems requires powerful and flexible priors. We propose leveraging pretrained latent diffusion models for this task through a new training-free approach, termed Diffusion-regularized Wasserstein Gradient Flow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-24 Tim Y. J. Wang , O. Deniz Akyildiz

This work is the third part of a program initiated in arXiv:2111.13258, arXiv:2302.06571 aiming at the development of an intrinsic geometric well-posedness theory for Hamilton-Jacobi equations related to controlled gradient flow problems in…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-02-02 Giovanni Conforti , Richard C. Kraaij , Luca Tamanini , Daniela Tonon

Vision-Language Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) (Rombach et al., 2022) provide powerful generative priors for inverse problems. However, existing LDM-based inverse solvers typically require a large number of neural function evaluations…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Alessio Spagnoletti , Tim Y. J. Wang , Marcelo Pereyra , O. Deniz Akyildiz

The Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme provides a stable variational framework for computing Wasserstein gradient flows, but its practical use is often limited by the high computational cost of repeatedly solving the JKO subproblems. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xue Feng , Li Wang , Deanna Needell , Rongjie Lai

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

In this work, we investigate a variational formulation for a time-fractional Fokker-Planck equation which arises in the study of complex physical systems involving anomalously slow diffusion. The model involves a fractional-order Caputo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-05 Manh Hong Duong , Bangti Jin

We formulate well-posed continuous-time generative flows for learning distributions that are supported on low-dimensional manifolds through Wasserstein proximal regularizations of $f$-divergences. Wasserstein-1 proximal operators regularize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-17 Hyemin Gu , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Luc Rey-Bellet , Benjamin J. Zhang

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

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