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Distributionally-robust optimization is often studied for a fixed set of distributions rather than time-varying distributions that can drift significantly over time (which is, for instance, the case in finance and sociology due to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-01 Iman Shames , Farhad Farokhi

We formulate a class of velocity-free finite-particle methods for mass transport problems based on a time-discrete incremental variational principle that combines entropy and the cost of particle transport, as measured by the Wasserstein…

Computational Physics · Physics 2023-05-10 Anna Pandolfi , Laurent Stainier , Michael Ortiz

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

Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Adil Salim , Anna Korba , Giulia Luise

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Jiaojiao Fan , Qinsheng Zhang , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Motivated by approximation Bayesian computation using mean-field variational approximation and the computation of equilibrium in multi-species systems with cross-interaction, this paper investigates the composite geodesically convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-18 Rentian Yao , Xiaohui Chen , Yun Yang

We study the Wasserstein natural gradient in parametric statistical models with continuous sample spaces. Our approach is to pull back the $L^2$-Wasserstein metric tensor in the probability density space to a parameter space, equipping the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-20 Yifan Chen , Wuchen Li

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most practical methods for learning data distributions. A popular GAN formulation is based on the use of Wasserstein distance as a metric between probability distributions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Maziar Sanjabi , Jimmy Ba , Meisam Razaviyayn , Jason D. Lee

We study first-order optimality conditions for constrained optimization in the Wasserstein space, whereby one seeks to minimize a real-valued function over the space of probability measures endowed with the Wasserstein distance. Our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-03 Nicolas Lanzetti , Saverio Bolognani , Florian Dörfler

We study the problem of minimizing the Wasserstein distance between a probability distribution and an algebraic variety. We consider the setting of finite state spaces and describe the solution depending on the choice of the ground metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 T. Ö. Çelik , A. Jamneshan , G. Montúfar , B. Sturmfels , L. Venturello

This paper introduces Wasserstein variational inference, a new form of approximate Bayesian inference based on optimal transport theory. Wasserstein variational inference uses a new family of divergences that includes both f-divergences and…

We study the computational complexity of the optimal transport problem that evaluates the Wasserstein distance between the distributions of two K-dimensional discrete random vectors. The best known algorithms for this problem run in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-17 Bahar Taşkesen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Daniel Kuhn , Karthik Natarajan

We develop the theory of a metric, which we call the $\nu$-based Wasserstein metric and denote by $W_\nu$, on the set of probability measures $\mathcal P(X)$ on a domain $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$. This metric is based on a slight…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-16 Luca Nenna , Brendan Pass

We propose a new clustering method based on optimal transportation. We solve optimal transportation with variational principles, and investigate the use of power diagrams as transportation plans for aggregating arbitrary domains into a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-07-27 Liang Mi , Wen Zhang , Xianfeng Gu , Yalin Wang

Optimal transport has gained significant attention in recent years due to its effectiveness in deep learning and computer vision. Its descendant metric, the Wasserstein distance, has been particularly successful in measuring distribution…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-18 Kaiwen Shi

We propose a fundamental metric for measuring the distance between two distributions. This metric, referred to as the decision-focused (DF) divergence, is tailored to stochastic linear optimization problems in which the objective…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-04 Suhan Liu , Mo Liu

Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of optimal transport, provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Jinjin Chi , Zhiyao Yang , Jihong Ouyang , Ximing Li

We study a variant of the dynamical optimal transport problem in which the energy to be minimised is modulated by the covariance matrix of the distribution. Such transport metrics arise naturally in mean-field limits of certain ensemble…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-12-23 Martin Burger , Matthias Erbar , Franca Hoffmann , Daniel Matthes , André Schlichting

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

We study the discretization of generalized Wasserstein distances with nonlinear mobilities on the real line via suitable discrete metrics on the cone of N ordered particles, a setting which naturally appears in the framework of…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2022-09-01 Simone Di Marino , Lorenzo Portinale , Emanuela Radici